ATI, What are you doing in Australia?
It's true Australia is a dump market. We just don't have a large enough population for companies to keep up us up-to-date with technology when it gets released. Instead we have, at least, a three month wait for the new technology to come out. What happened last year was that suppliers could not import enough high end product to satisfy demand. The manufacturers had created a bottleneck for supply of high end product. Retailers (such as ourselves) had to wait, sometimes longer than three months, to get product that our customers were asking for. Considering we live in the modern world and even Hollywood has cottoned on to the idea of world wide release dates why is it that we have to wait so long for new technology?
As far as I am concerned, ATI have dropped the ball. They were the market leaders in respect to high end video card technology. They had managed to edge NVIDIA just out of the equation with the 9800 and X800 series of cards. However, we have been living in a market vacuum over the last twelve months. It seems that ATI's marketing department has been getting ahead of their manufacturing area and proclaiming the new release of product before they can possibly deliver. Crossfire was promoted as early as February and March this year and is still yet to see official release in Australia. Even now DFI Lan Party are the only motherboard manufacturer to release a crossfire ready motherboard in Australia and the first overseas. What's more is that ATI have not seen a significant card release this year. Once again, their marketing department has beaten their manufacturing arm to the punch and pronounced the awesome power of the X1800XT but there is no sight of the card on the horizon for the Australian market. They have even made the bold claim that some computer nuts in Europe have managed to overclock the X1800XT up to 1 gig for the graphics processor and 2 gig for the RAM. Big deal. Why would I wait another two to three months for a card to come out when I can get a high end NVIDIA 7800GTX now? Why would consumers wait for any kind of brand loyalty when our country is at the arse end of the technology market anyway.
These practices just aren't acceptable in the modern marketplace. ATI should pull their finger out, because all that is going to happen is that they will fall behind NVIDIA in the development cycle. They are already losing sales because of their lack of high end product. Last year 90 per cent of the Desktops we sold were shipped with ATI cards. In the last six months we haven't sold a Desktop with an ATI card in it. Of all the desktops we've sold in the last two months, only one of them didn't ship with an SLI configeration. So what, we are only a small retailer. We build custom desktop PCs for gaming, what kind of indicator is that to overall sales? We are indicative of any business, just not on the scale of Harvey Norman or Dell. Our customers ask us for advice and we push them towards what would be the best technology for their budget at the time. The fact of the matter is that we don't even talk to customers about high end ATI cards any more. We can't tell a customer to wait three months for the X1800XT to come out because the customer doesn't want to wait three months to get their new computer.
It is a shame that we have to wait for so long for new technology to be released in this country when they tell us the world is so small now. Consumers in Australia should have the same choices as those overseas and at the same time. It is a shame when half of a duopoly drops the ball because all that leaves you with is one other choice. With a world and a marketplace which is meant to be so far advanced and the best for everyone when you are left with one choice then you have no choice at all.
It's true Australia is a dump market. We just don't have a large enough population for companies to keep up us up-to-date with technology when it gets released. Instead we have, at least, a three month wait for the new technology to come out. What happened last year was that suppliers could not import enough high end product to satisfy demand. The manufacturers had created a bottleneck for supply of high end product. Retailers (such as ourselves) had to wait, sometimes longer than three months, to get product that our customers were asking for. Considering we live in the modern world and even Hollywood has cottoned on to the idea of world wide release dates why is it that we have to wait so long for new technology?
As far as I am concerned, ATI have dropped the ball. They were the market leaders in respect to high end video card technology. They had managed to edge NVIDIA just out of the equation with the 9800 and X800 series of cards. However, we have been living in a market vacuum over the last twelve months. It seems that ATI's marketing department has been getting ahead of their manufacturing area and proclaiming the new release of product before they can possibly deliver. Crossfire was promoted as early as February and March this year and is still yet to see official release in Australia. Even now DFI Lan Party are the only motherboard manufacturer to release a crossfire ready motherboard in Australia and the first overseas. What's more is that ATI have not seen a significant card release this year. Once again, their marketing department has beaten their manufacturing arm to the punch and pronounced the awesome power of the X1800XT but there is no sight of the card on the horizon for the Australian market. They have even made the bold claim that some computer nuts in Europe have managed to overclock the X1800XT up to 1 gig for the graphics processor and 2 gig for the RAM. Big deal. Why would I wait another two to three months for a card to come out when I can get a high end NVIDIA 7800GTX now? Why would consumers wait for any kind of brand loyalty when our country is at the arse end of the technology market anyway.
These practices just aren't acceptable in the modern marketplace. ATI should pull their finger out, because all that is going to happen is that they will fall behind NVIDIA in the development cycle. They are already losing sales because of their lack of high end product. Last year 90 per cent of the Desktops we sold were shipped with ATI cards. In the last six months we haven't sold a Desktop with an ATI card in it. Of all the desktops we've sold in the last two months, only one of them didn't ship with an SLI configeration. So what, we are only a small retailer. We build custom desktop PCs for gaming, what kind of indicator is that to overall sales? We are indicative of any business, just not on the scale of Harvey Norman or Dell. Our customers ask us for advice and we push them towards what would be the best technology for their budget at the time. The fact of the matter is that we don't even talk to customers about high end ATI cards any more. We can't tell a customer to wait three months for the X1800XT to come out because the customer doesn't want to wait three months to get their new computer.
It is a shame that we have to wait for so long for new technology to be released in this country when they tell us the world is so small now. Consumers in Australia should have the same choices as those overseas and at the same time. It is a shame when half of a duopoly drops the ball because all that leaves you with is one other choice. With a world and a marketplace which is meant to be so far advanced and the best for everyone when you are left with one choice then you have no choice at all.
posted by thecynicalgamer @ 5:42 pm
1 Comments:
At 3:37 pm,
Anonymous said…
I agree. Originally i thought that ATI were going to be the Nvidia that beatdown 3dFX - looks like they just don't have the steam to keep things going. that or Nvidia have some smart cookies working there that have managed to keep striving even when they were on top..
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