Szerző: Barna József

2001. február 17. 17:17

Y2K: As They See it...

2000 definitely was a buzzing year in the history of computer technology. It witnessed the appearance of new technologies as well as the rise and fall of some computer companies. It would be a laborious enterprise to just briefly outline what happened in the industry in general in the past year. For this reason, we thought that we were going to be a bit more moderate in our pursuits; and accordingly decided to ask some of the most influential computer companies about how they assessed their own role in and contribution to what 2000 had brought about in the field of computer technology.

2000 definitely was a buzzing year in the history of computer technology. It witnessed the appearance of new technologies as well as the rise and fall of some computer companies. It would be a laborious enterprise to just briefly outline what happened in the industry in general in the past year. For this reason, we thought that we were going to be a bit more moderate in our pursuits; and accordingly decided to ask some of the most influential computer companies about how they assessed their own role in and contribution to what 2000 had brought about in the field of computer technology.

Therefore we sent a circular to those PC hardware companies with whom we had been in contact for some time. Our letter contained a single question:

What does your company regard as its greatest achievement in 2000?

Quite naturally, the answers you will find below do not represent the whole spectrum of the computer industry. The scope of the piece is limited not only by the fact that we asked but those whom we are in contact, but also by that not all of them provided an answer. The length of the replies varies; yet - as not everyone asked took the pains to participate in the project - we decided to post them uncut.

Despite the apparent editorial weaknesses of this piece, we do hope that the answers from company reps will make an interesting read. So here they are:

Róbert Golubeff, Internet Strategy Director at Intel Corporation:

Our "best result" may be summarized as a combination of various factors. Intel definitely strengthened its position as the leading "building block" supplier of the Internet economy. As regards processors, a completely new architecture has appeared with the introduction of the Pentium 4 processor, which was designed exactly for those solutions where the Internet is headed in the future. The development of the Itanium processor, the future processor of Internet data centers progresses as planned: several thousands have already been produced and OEM manufacturers as well as software developers are now working on opening new perspectives for the performance of data centers during 2001. In terms of base technology, we have developed one of the smallest transistors of the world, the "thickness" of which equals to three atomic layers; we continuously decrease the size and power consumption of chips to comply with the increasing requirements of the Internet economy.

Jan Gütter, PR Manager at AMD Corporation:

In 2000 AMD was the first at one GHz, thus being the undisputed performance leader for most of 2000 with its award winning AMD Athlon(tm) processor. Last but not least, the AMD Duron(tm) and the AMD Athlon processor enabled AMD to meet all the various needs of both value conscious buyers as well as those customers looking for high performance computing solutions.

Richard Brown, PR Manager at VIA Technologies Inc.:

You certainly ask an interesting question; it's difficult to give a concise answer. I guess that our greatest single achievement would be our successful roll out of Slot A and Socket A KX133, KT133, and most recently KT133A and KM133 chipsets for the AMD Athlon and Duron processors. This has shown our ability to enable a new platform and bring it into large volumes in a very short time period.

In addition to that, I would also count the launch of the VIA Cyrix III as a great achievement; this is the first processor developed by VIA . Other achievements would include the DDR roll out and reaching a chipset market share of 40%. Overall, it's been a very exciting (if exhausting!) year!

Phillip Bergman, Communications Manager at Transmeta:

Transmeta's greatest accomplishment this year has been to announce several major computer manufacturers as customers of the Crusoe microprocessor less than one year after announcing the nature of our business. These customers include Sony, Hitachi, NEC, Fujitsu and Gateway, among others.

In January 2000, Transmeta announced that it had developed a revolutionary new microprocessor design using software to adjust the megahertz of the microprocessor to allow portable computing devices, like notebook computers, to operate as efficiently as possible for longer battery life. The Crusoe microprocessor has received significant attention as a breakthrough technology, but we are most satisfied by the fact that it is being adopted by major customers that recognize the importance of long battery life in an increasingly mobile world.

[oldal:Motherboard Manufacturers]

Gerhard Jonkeren, Eastern European Marketing Manager at MSI:

Well, here we go, I have to warn you that this will not be a short story. Year 2000 has been very exiting for MSI. As to your question about the greatest achievement for MSI in 2000, I strongly believe that, for MSI world wide, our greatest achievement was the implementation of a combination of 3 aims: localization, diversification and expansion, which I will explain further on.

By means of this strategy, we were able to achieve one of the highest growthrates among our M/B manufacturing colleagues world wide in 2000. We are now within the TOP 3 Taiwanese M/B manufacturers and this year, we are coming really close towards the No.1 company in M/B output and sometimes even exceeding our competitors in price/performance ratio. M/B Output for MSI in 2000 was around 9 mln. pieces compared to 5.9 mln. for 1999, which is quite a growth (for your reference, ASUS's output for the same year was around 12 mln. M/B and ABIT's, as far as I know, is around 2.5 mln). As you might know, for a lot of 2nd-tier M/B vendors 2001 will not be very prosperous as they couldn't reach an economic scale and their business results do not allow much investment in innovation and technical research & development. Some of our M/B manufacturing competitors, like B** and S** company have already officially announced that they are suffering losses. It seems that more companies will look for mergers or encounter a difficult financial situation in 2001. So actually, maintaining a strong position among 1st-tier manufacturers and being out of the critical 2nd-tier group can also be seen as a great achievement of MSI in 2000.

MSI is the leading M/B company in ways of localization. We are putting more and more emphasis on local support. As examples, I would like to mention the foundation of our European Head Office in The Netherlands and our plans to increase our number of MSI offices world-wide from 12 towards 15-18 (USA, England, China, etc.) in 2001. Also, we have been able to increase local support to the channel by ways of advertising, entering local contests, increasing RMA-return speed, providing product supply to our partners and increasing the number of local MSI websites in local languages. We believe in local & direct personal support and are therefore also organizing local events, like, for example, the upcoming Eastern Europe Roadshow "FUTURE PC TECHnology" with AMD, NVIDIA and Seagate in February 2001.

To be ready for the future, everybody knows that the consumer market moves more and more to the IA-segment and the corporate market to a higher integration of their LAN or even WAN environment in order to improve accessibility of files and to be able to actively be present on the Internet. MSI also sees this, and I have to say, this year we are going stabile towards diversification of our product assortment to be ready for the future. Next to motherboards and graphic cards, which is still our core business, we have now established new products, which are waiting to be launched at the beginning of 2001. In the PC segment, we will also have MSI CD-ROM, DVD and CDR-W drives; in the IA (Internet Appliance) segment, we have PDA's (Pocket PC's), Set-Top Boxes for browsing Internet trough your TV-Set; in the corporate segment, we have Windows based terminals, barebone/Net PC's and a wide range of high-end server boards. I think we have chosen a good MSI slogan "Link to the future"!

For our third "greatest achievement" for 2000, I have to say that the increase of our production capacity was quite exciting. From the beginning of 2000, when we were able to yield a maximum monthly M/B output of around 0.5-0.6 mln. pieces, we have heavily invested in capacity expansion by building new high-tech factories resulting in a new Taiwan III Factory (with a maximum monthly output of 1.2 mln.) and a new China II Factory, which will be 100% ready in March 2001 (capable of producing another 1.2 mln. pieces), resulting in a total maximum monthly capacity of 2.4 mln. products. If you see our new product plan for 2001 and our goal for 2001/2002 to reach a leading position in our current and new market segments, you can imagine that we will need the capacity for sure!

Well, to conclude, I have to say that MSI's achievements world wide and in Europe are not attributable only to our products, quality or pricing strategy. I strongly believe that we were able to grow thanks to our local partners, due to their great efforts and excellent support, for which we have great respect and admiration!! Actually, this is our No.1 achievement.

Eric Boeing, PR Manager at ABIT:

That one is easy. ABIT's greatest accomplishment in 2000 was bringing to market the best-designed and best-selling Socket A motherboard out there, the KT7-RAID. It's arguably the best board ABIT has ever made, and we are very pleased that it is doing so well. For 2001, we hope to expand our line with more dual CPU (we anticipate that our dual PIII model, the VP6 will continue selling quite well throughout 2001, and the AMD 760MP chipset is very promising), DDR, and Pentium 4 products. We will also be expanding our line of 6-channel audio products, plus our NVIDIA-based VGA cards and our barebone system lines.

Jimmy Tsao, Marketing Manager at Soltek:

Soltek in 2000 enhanced the balance of overclocking performance, system stability and setting convenience to a brand new age. With that outstanding achievement, Soltek dramatically increased the popularity both with heavy users and beginners, which enabled Soltek to grow up the sales by 80% despite the recession of the industry.

Cecilia Huang-Fu, PR Manager at ASUS:

no reply yet

Loes de Vlaam, European Marketing Manager at AOpen:

no reply yet

[oldal:Video Card Manufacturers]

Diane Vanasse, PR Specialist at NVIDIA Corporation:

In 2000 NVIDIA introduced our flagship technology GeForce2, and delivered it top to bottom in the desktop PC market while also leveraging that technology to allow NVIDIA to expand into new areas such as workstation and the mobile space.

Rene Fröleke, PR Manager at ATi:

Our greatest achievement in 2000 was certainly the successful launch of our Radeon chip. Not only did it bring us back into the high-performance gaming market, but also we designed the most feature-rich graphic chip that is currently available in stores. It offers the customer top-notch 3D performance coupled with exciting new features, outstanding picture quality and of course the best DVD and video acceleration on the market.

Sebastian Macdougall, Matrox Online PR Specialist:

It is difficult to choose only one great Matrox achievement for the year, but perhaps the one that defines our leadership this year is the success we have enjoyed with our DualHead Display feature. In 1999, the G400 series introduced DualHead to the masses and the reception was very positive indeed. In 2000, the growth of the multi-monitor market broadened, and in tandem, Matrox continued to work on improving its DualHead Display feature. Re-einforcing this trend towards the use of dual display in the corporate workspace is our competition's recent introduction of their own multi-monitor offerings. As the saying goes, imitation is the best form of flattery--in this case, imitation is also the best endorsement of our position as a leader in the development of real productivity-enhancing features for the corporate desktop. We look forward to creating more trend-inspiring features in 2001.

Alf Covey, ex-PR Manager at 3dfx Corporation:

There are many things we're particularly proud of here at 3dfx. We've managed to retain the number one position in retail for the entire year (actually since 1998), there's our co-development of DirectX 8.0 with Microsoft, which now incorporates the multi-sample buffer as a standard feature, and of course full scene anti-aliasing. I'd have to say the feature that we are most proud of, as it is no doubt responsible in part for the above, is FSAA. It is now becoming a standard feature for many video cards (as we predicted) but our rotated grid multi-sample technique remains the fastest, most efficient and visually pleasing method on the market.

[oldal:Multimedia Companies]

Riccardo de Rinaldini, European Marketing Communications Manager at Creative Labs:

The year 2000 was an incredible year for Creative, for sure the best way to end the old millennium or to start the new one, depending on the point of views. As I said it has been a very positive and interesting year, in a market as rapidly growing as the one of information technology it is difficult to point out just one achievement because new products, new markets, new technologies just come one after another, and looking back it is hard to believe that so much has happened in the past 12 months! Just to point out a few examples: one year ago nobody would have thought of carrying around a WebCam and using it separately from the PC to take photos; today thousands of people in Europe do it. The WebCam Go Plus has made this possible. Creative invented a whole new category of products and web based usage of digital photography is making a huge success. Another example is Dolby Digital technology: one year ago, it was something very high-end, available only for a limited number of people having DVD and big home theater systems. Today it is accessible for all PC users thanks to the new range of Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 cards with Dolby Digital decoding capabilites and the new range of DeskTop Theater and PlayWorks speakers.

But if I come to think of it, our greatest achievement has got to do with something revolutionary, which didn't exist before. The Digital Audio Player D.A.P Jukebox is definitely something like this. We have made available a completely new concept of living with music. Digital music is now very popular: it ensures high quality and, when compressed, it can be downloaded easily from the Web or converted from original CDs. The Jukebox allows you to store and carry with you 150 CDs of music. Wherever you are: at home connected to a speaker system, in the car, connected to the car stereo or around with headphones, the Jukebox allows you to have 100 hours of music, your whole music collection on you. This didn't exist before, now it does. The Jukebox and it's success are for sure our greatest achievement of the year!

David Harold, PR Manager at Imagination Technologies:

I'm sure everyone here at Imagination Technologies has a different answer to that question. For me the achievement that has given me the most pleasure is the wide spread of our technology over the past year. Wherever I go now I meet someone who owns a PowerVR device, whether a Dreamcast or a PC card, or I see a PowerVR enabled arcade machine. It's still amazing and delightful to think of the millions of people who own something with our technology in it, and the millions more who come into contact with our technology while they're having fun with their friends.

Many thanks for everyone who provided an answer!

Nagyon széles az a skála, amin az állásinterjú visszajelzések tartalmi minősége mozog: túl rövid, túl hosszú, semmitmondó, értelmetlen vagy semmi. A friss heti kraftie hírlevélben ezt jártuk körül. Ha tetszett a cikk, iratkozz fel, és minden héten elküldjük emailben a legfrissebbet!

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