Paper Launches
As I was walking the eisles of BestBuy today, I happened to noticed that they had NVIDIA GeForce 6800 cards on the shelf. Finally the 6800's are shipping in large enough quantities to hit mass market retail shelves. Up until now, BestBuy only had the long in tooth GeForce 5xxx series available. So why do I bring this up? Well because I'm tired of the commonly known business practice called "Paper Launching".
Launching some paper...
NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce 6800 card way back on April 14th, 2004. According to their press release, they promised the cards were already currently shipping to their partners and that retail boards would appear within 45 days. When I attended the E3 Expo in mid May, the cards still were not out yet so I asked the employee at the NVIDIA booth when they should be expected. Her answer was a simple, "within a few weeks". Well a long 5 months later, they actually are out now. Even Apple is shipping the G5 Power Mac version of these cards to their customers who ordered them for the 30" Cinema Displays back in June.
This "paper launching" practice is by no means limited to NVIDIA. ATI is just as guilty of it as well. Their top of the line RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition has just started shipping after being announced back on May 4th, 2004. The delay between the product's announced date and the actual date you can walk into a retail store and pick one up seems to be getting longer all the time. This is probably the reason why both ATI and NVIDIA have announced that they will not be introducting new video cards every six months like they used to.
This problem is not unique to video card manufactures by any means as both Intel and AMD are guilty of it as well. I'm not against pre-anouncing products ahead of time, its just that the companies that do it seem to have gotten out of hand regarding when they announce their products to the time it get's released in mass quantities that the pre-announcement date has become practically meaningless.
Launching some paper...
NVIDIA officially announced the GeForce 6800 card way back on April 14th, 2004. According to their press release, they promised the cards were already currently shipping to their partners and that retail boards would appear within 45 days. When I attended the E3 Expo in mid May, the cards still were not out yet so I asked the employee at the NVIDIA booth when they should be expected. Her answer was a simple, "within a few weeks". Well a long 5 months later, they actually are out now. Even Apple is shipping the G5 Power Mac version of these cards to their customers who ordered them for the 30" Cinema Displays back in June.
This "paper launching" practice is by no means limited to NVIDIA. ATI is just as guilty of it as well. Their top of the line RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition has just started shipping after being announced back on May 4th, 2004. The delay between the product's announced date and the actual date you can walk into a retail store and pick one up seems to be getting longer all the time. This is probably the reason why both ATI and NVIDIA have announced that they will not be introducting new video cards every six months like they used to.
This problem is not unique to video card manufactures by any means as both Intel and AMD are guilty of it as well. I'm not against pre-anouncing products ahead of time, its just that the companies that do it seem to have gotten out of hand regarding when they announce their products to the time it get's released in mass quantities that the pre-announcement date has become practically meaningless.
posted by Marcos at October 17, 2004
1 Comments:
Good to see your thoughts on the rise of paper launches. It's madness! Here's an article from Tom's Hardware that would have been perfect in your blog. Published just a day after yours!
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