Improbable Insights

Page :« 1 2 3 4»

What’s Going on with Nvidia?

Before I dive into this analysis, a bit of disclosure is in order: I worked at Nvidia briefly (roughly nine months) back in 2000, prior to leaving to help launch ExtremeTech.

Nvidia is one of those companies that I have a somewhat bipolar relationship with. On the one hand, they’re technology driven, have a large percentage of the best 3D graphics architects under one roof and have, in the past, constantly pushed the edge of the envelope, both in technology and in marketing. They’ve driven some important and cool technologies in the past decade.

As with any fast growing technology company, though, Nvidia is more complicated than just being a cool tech company.

The Edge of the Envelope

While Nvidia has pushed the edge of the envelope in some key technologies, they’ve also been innovative in other areas. Viral marketing, rather than big advertising campaigns, were one hallmark. Marketing was a relatively lean operation, and often focused at the needs of developers over flashy ad campaigns. In that respect, Nvidia is much like Microsoft. (This is a compliment, not an insult, by the way. One of the reasons for Microsoft’s success is its strong focus on making life easier for developers. The more apps, the more OS sales, after all.)

As a technology analyst, they’ve been a mixed bag to work with. For one thing, the corporate culture seems to be pretty thin-skinned. When I was the EIC at ExtremeTech, any comment that could possibly be interpreted as negative would result in an email or phone call. The PR team can be somewhat prickly at time. Some of this is historical. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang used to tell company meetings that they were “nine months from going out of business.”

Any company that’s told it’s constantly teetering on the brink will naturally develop something of a bunker mentality over time. After all, it’s them against the world.

At one point in time, that was true. When they launched the project to develop the original RIVA128, they had about nine months of capital left. That chip set something of a record from inception to shipment. But that herculean effort has also been something of a historical albatross around the company’s neck.

Some of the aggressiveness and breakneck development pace is the nature of the business, of course. The pace of improvements in 3D graphics hardware for PCs in the past decade has been pretty breathtaking, and the competition fierce. I was actually working for Nvidia when ATI (then independent of AMD) launched the Radeon 9700, completely catching Nvidia off guard with its level of performance.

It seems to be a cyclical thing. Nvidia pushes out very cool GPUs at key generational points – typically, a new release of DirectX. Then Nvidia proceeds to crank out slightly updated versions of the same hardware for the next several years. This last product cycle more so: the company pumped out rebadged and slightly enhanced versions of the G92, than anything in the past. Clearly, Nvidia was looking to G92 to carry their mainstream line forward for a substantial interval.