Originally posted by: mchammer187
while this certainly isnt good it will not hurt Nvidia in the long run
IMO elsa was not that big here anyway
Losing Elsa was the biggest pain for nVidia, Elsa was a huge part of nVidia's business strategy.
With Elsa they had a manufacturer that was well known and quite reputable in the Professional 3D accelerator market, a market known to be very slow to accept newcomers... a market nVidia was new in, but Elsa was a known entity.
In addition Elsa's engineers had a HUGE part in helping to design and test the Quadro drivers, and assist in getting them fully ISV certified.
nVidia's engineers had little experience with the requirements of the Proi market, and their first Quadro drivers were openly acknowledged as being extremely unrelaible, unstable, incompatible, and slow... they were really lacking inoptimizations for many commonly used Pro 3D apps.
They lacked support for blinn shading, per=process DRAM allocation etc etc.
Along came Elsa to provide their experience in the Pro3D market and assistance in creating the Quadro drivers.
Elsa helped to push nVidia into the Pro3D realm, and helped them gain acceptance as a viable competitor.
nVidia losing Elsa would be akin to ATi losing FireGL.
They've been able to hire a number of Elsa's former engineers but it's doubtlessly hurt development to lose even part of their experience. Plus they are now stuck with relying upon PNY, a complete unknown in the Pro3D market.
If they hadnt had Elsa to help push them into the Pro3D market in the first place they wouldnt be their now, and I'd hate to imagine the ill repute they'd have gained with their Pro3D driver/application/certiofcation process without Elsa's assistance.
Losing VisionTek is almost a mild twist of fortune in comparison.
VisionTek was the formerly the number one retailer of nVIDIA graphics cards in all of North America. Certainly a signficant loss, but nothing that can't be overcome... PNY is large, and is quickly gaining marketshare, they also have a nice cash flow and good if not great production resources.
I doubt PNY will be able to supply the North Americal market as easily as VisionTek could, and they certainly don't have the strong Retail brand name recognition that VisionTek brought to the table.... but they can recover with some difficultly, albeit they'll likely lose shelf space and probably a decent number of sales in the short to mid term.
Creative... one a strong entity, had dropped to relatively lowly sales almost a full 1.5years prior to dropping nVidia, so the loss of Creative likely didnt even phase them.
Hercules hurt, they are the largest seller of retail products in the European market, and Hercules has exceptional manufacturing resources through their parent copany Guillemot. Hercules also possesses excellent brand name recognition world wide in the enthusiast community, along with one of the largest advertising/PR budgets of the third party graphics card manufacturers.
Still Hercules had beaning weaning away from nVidia for 15 months prior to their partnership with ATi. nVidia was already well on their way with dealing with the loss of Hercules, and had pused other entities into the segment Hercules had previously covered.
This did much to minimize the loss they felt by Hercules shipping Kyro/ATi products.
The two big manufacturers remaining are MSI and PNY. MSI provides boards for numerous other third party manufacturers, and PNY has the Retail presence.
If they were to lose either of those, they'd be in a very bad situation.
So long as they retain MSI/PNY they'll cope with the loss of VisionTek, and Elsa adequately.
I'm sure PNY/MSI are well aware nVidia cannot afford to lose them now, as they have no one left to fill the shoes MSI/PNY wear.
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