Wednesday, April 26, 2006

The dirtiest ever marketing strategy

It has been a long time since I heard of something new from the grass root level coming out of the Intel stables. And the last time it happened was with the introduction of Hyper Threading technology (I don't see anything new in Yonah since it's nothing but rebuffed Piii) . Any industry leader failing to make a breakthrough since such a long time and seeing its market share being eroded by an aggresive competitor; may take a step that can be termed unethical, if not illegal. Hence to say, Intel did what they specialize in : dirty marketting. They are accused of paying heavy incentives to Skype to restrict some features for AMD user's which will be enjoyed exclusively by Intel users.

The feature under the lens is the 10 way conferencing from Skype, which has been restricted to max 5 way for AMD users. Skype is using an operation called "Get CPU ID" to identify the type of processor running on the PC. The Skype software has been preset to only accept Intel's chips as having the performance necessary to host conference calls of more than five people. The question is why would anybody deliberately add more code lines, just to make his own software perform badly. Certainly an evil nexus.

This act of Intel only shows the level of desperation which their top level management was feeling to cut the increasing market presence of AMD.

Would you avoid buying a PC with the most efficient processor on earth, only because you can host an internet conference with 6 people with a below par Intel processor. Chip giant Intel is betting that at least some people would. Its really shameful for Intel that it has got nothing else but this, to keep itself clinging where it is.

AMD has now dragged Skype to the court by serving them yet another subpoena case. Though in my opinion AMD should have kept quiet on this matter and maintained a 'love to be hated stance'.

I have been going through the public opinions on this matter and most of then aggresively against the dirty trick played by Skype and Intel. And for those who don't want to give away the best (AMD) but unfortunately have to keep the rest (Skype), the famous Mac Hacker Maxxuss has released a patch to bypass the evil Get CPU ID code.

The point to be noted here is that neither Intel nor Skype are market leaders in their fields (if technical efficiency is considered, market share goes the other why), so why bother about them. Go for AMD, dump Skype. Its no way near Google Talk.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

As you have suggested the AMD should keep quiet. This type of stance could have affected the market of AMD since you may know about their dirty marketing techniques but others may not. So better to retaliate.

Pratyush said...

Dear Mr Anonymous,

Its a fact that you might not be knowing that AMD has very limited production capacity and currently it is not in a position to meet the increasing demand of its processors. Few months back I went to a vendor who deals in AMD only products. There was a fellow asking him for an Athlon 64 3200+, and it was not available at that time. All the vendor was able to provide at that time were only a few pieces of 3500+. This was not the first time i was seeing this happen. Due to the low production capacity of AMD Dell and Apple don't use it's processors.

The person who wanted to buy an Athlon processor was working in Microsoft. Its not just a coincidence that most of the AMD users are techies. In my opinion AMD is currently not in a position to match the production capacity of Intel, and since there is already a shortage of AMD processors in market, they can't push up the sales even if they win the case against Skype. In my opinion it would be better for them if they maintain themselves as a niche class processors rather than a general stuff like those of Intel.

Think how despite of very small sales Apple mainatined its status as an elite product with regard to the PCs.