Originally posted by Humus:
I understood it was a joke, but it had the tone of the overall attitude I see coming more and more from nVidia these days. nVidias attitude has most definitely changed. The care for the customers is gone. (Riddle: If ATi and nVidia were to define the getCustomerSupport(char *problem) function, how would they differ?
A: nVidias would return void.)
I see nVidida walking the same way as M$ and Intel, and it’s really sad. Sure, the underdog stuff is also a part of the equation. But in the end, ATi is the bigger company and have been so for a long time, but still they don’t have that attitude. 3dfx lost many customers because of their attitude. I think nVidia will do it too now, and especially their potential customners (the old 3dfx customers).
I also don’t understand this attitude.
First of all, we have no contact with direct retail customers, so I don’t see how it is even possible for us to somehow “stop caring” about them. The customers we support are all OEMs. I think a lot of people vastly underestimate the importance of the OEM channel, as opposed to the retail channel. Remember that over 90% of the graphics market is OEM.
3dfx’s problems had nothing to do with any attitude. They were far more fundamental. I think the history books are pretty clear on that.
You compare us to Microsoft and Intel. A lot of “techy” people hate Microsoft and Intel, for reasons that I think are ridiculous. It’s the whole “monopolist” thing, as far as I can tell; “they care about money more than they care about me!” In the real world, as opposed to the fantasy world that Judge Jackson lives in, however, all companies are striving to grow their market share and attain a monopoly. Unfortunately, our silly antitrust laws have made it OK to think that a privately attained monopoly or near-monopoly, which is a sign of an extraordinarily succesful company, is somehow a “bad” thing. I would love for NVIDIA to be just as successful as Microsoft and Intel. Today we’re not. Hopefully some day we will be.
You say we care less – but I haven’t seen a single concrete example. I, on the other hand, see it the other way around. The only way that our growth over the last few years can be explained is that we have cared more. Companies are successful for exactly one reason: they meet the needs of consumers better than their competitors do.
In the end, our level of support is certainly not measured by how much we hold customers’ hands. I would much rather you judge our level of support by the quality of products we put out. For example, I’ve implemented a lot of extensions in our OpenGL driver. Every one of those extensions, in my opinion, constitutes real, genuine support to developers.
Do you have a real complaint? If you do, I’d be happy to try to address it. That’s why I’m here. (I’ve found and fixed several driver bugs due to reports on this forum.)
If you don’t have a real complaint, well, then, I don’t see what the problem is.
- Matt