On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Tim Roberts wrote:
> On 18 Jul 2003 20:16:35 -0500, William Suetholz wrote:
> >
> >On the other hand.. If more people who didn't want to have to run
> >another OS to access features that are not well supported because of
> >lack of knowledge on how to support them would comment/complain
> >(oh alright -BITCH-) maybe the hardware vendors would realize that there
> >is a viable market for their devices to be used on the second class OS's
>
> The reality of the business end of this is just brutal. The unfortunate fact
> is that your "viable market" is completely insignificant.
>
> ATI doesn't make money from you. ATI doesn't make money from the few tens of
> thousands of Linux users out there. At their margins, that probably pays for
> part of one engineer's salary.
>
> No, ATI makes money when IBM orders 2 million Rage chips for their next
> generation laptop. If IBM made the deal conditional on ATI providing high-
> quality, high-functionality XFree86 drivers, you can bet they would trip over
> their shoelaces in providing that. However, they don't. IBM makes the deal
> conditional on great WinXP drivers and great DX9 support, because to 3
> standard deviations, that's what its customers want.
>
> In business terms, the Linux market is not relevant. Sad but true.
For consumer desktop that's true. There is one potential business
case in the professional desktop market. SGI's, HP's and Sun's old
workstation customers have been moving over to Linux. All the film
studios are using Linux, for instance. The volume is small but the
margins on the professional cards is high so there is a chance that
it might actually make money some day. If it weren't for this
potential in the professional market, NVIDIA probably wouldn't have
any binary Linux drivers. The real target of those drivers is the
NVIDIA Quadro line not the GeForce line.
Ironically, the Linux desktop community doesn't target the
only potential business case there is. It's often at odds with
it. Workstation users like a platform that doesn't change and anything
that risks damaging OpenGL behavior (like RandR support or alpha
blended cursors) is generally not well accepted.
As for the viability of a particular market, here's an example.
Yahoo's business section lists NVIDIA as having 1513 employees and
revenue over the last year was $1731 Million. This is revenue of
over $1 Million per employee per year. That 1513 includes everybody
including secretaries, etc... so there is obviously well over a
Million dollars revenue per engineer. One man year of extra work
is generally expected to generate at least a Million extra dollars
of revenue. If a particular market can't generate that, resources
are best allocated to another project.
Mark.
>
> >I would actually be satisfied with Binary only drivers that would
> >support the whole card. But, there aren't enough people letting them
> >know that there is an interest (OOPS that would be BITCHING!).
>
> And even if EVERY person let them know there was an interest, it still
> wouldn't be enough. There just aren't enough of us.
>
> --
> - Tim Roberts, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.
>
>
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