The Mouth Or The Money

So, I ask the question: If you AMD fanboys love your AMD so much, how come you can't buy more of its stuff? What's the matter? Got the mouth, and not the money? Or are you secretly working your way through college on Intel scholarships and just hoping that enough freaky attitude about every K8 announcement or mention of AMD will make decent, law abiding, polite, and mature computer users run for the nearest Dell URL?

AMD needs to ditch its more rabid fans, and get a grip on the real world. Before AMD turns into Apple: plucky outsiders, the eternal underdog, the place where the success-phobic go to rage at the do-betters. Okay, so it's not exactly a fair comparison. Apple's fan base includes nice looking graphic designers who are not guys, and they have the odd writer and movie star on their user list. Apple is the anti-PC PC. But, what does AMD have to gain from being an outsider?

No Wanna AMD To Be Apple

The same problem that has eternally plagued Apple, in great part because of the company's enthusiastic fan base, plagues AMD: what corporation, enterprise, or government IT shop is going to feel comfortable moving from gray to grape? The big bucks buyers, the guys who really matter, don't want to be associated with anything but the secure, the established, the confident image of respectability.

No Fortune 1000 company is going to want to hire a guy as CEO if he walks into an interview with a chip on his shoulder, a deep belief that the world is out to get him, and a marketing plan that calls for making bad puns about the competition. Why the heck would anyone want to invest in hardware with the same attitude?

And, don't give me the Intel is a monopoly line. Sure, Intel is a monopoly. So is Microsoft. They got there because the system allowed them to get there. The system will break them, too, as it has broken every monopoly, but a plucky underdog won't. There are no revolutions in business. Everyone should have learned that lesson from the Internet Bubble. Hype generates money for the few. In this instance, AMD's best bet is to rise to the stature of an Intel, rather than try and lower Intel to its level, because that ain't going to happen.

Again, I have to say that I don't blame AMD, although its marketing people should have a grip on this concept by now.

Attitude rubs off, and AMD's attitude has been so laissez-faire that it is in danger of believing its own PR. I'll give this to Microsoft, and to some extent Intel: they don't believe their own PR. They go after the widest possible audience, and court it aggressively. They don't pin themselves into untenable positions, or get self-conscious.

Damn it, attitude is everything. And I have no problems saying that because we deal with corporate attitude here every day. As consumers you don't get to see it, which is probably a good thing. We don't want you to become cynics, but a little skepticism might help.

Attitude is in the way a product is presented, a PR plan unravels before our eyes, the way a product pitch goes, and almost every aspect of the way our audience reacts to what we write about a certain company.