Fixed your quote.
Fact is, we should not let companies get away with FUD/BS/Spin/lies when those of us with an understanding can educate those people who don't know what is going on.We simply shouldn't accept companies that lie to us to get our money.
It's obvious when we see PR say "number of cores aren't meaningful" and then flip around to "we have more cores than Intel" when it's convenient. Which is true and which is untrue? Can we just discount everything Nvidia claim because we don't know what is true and what is lies?
Well said, and of course the issue isn't about "semantics" at all, but it's about attempting to create perceptual linkages in the minds of consumers, and whether such linkages actually exist in reality rarely concerns the people who write such marketing copy. Rather, in such cases, it is my opinion that the goal of the negative marketeer is to create perceptions that are not grounded in reality as opposed to those that are. I agree with you completely.
Generally as a rule, negative marketing will always fail, which makes it all the more surprising when we see companies continuously fall back to doing it whenever a competitor catches them by surprise. Two major examples of relatively recent negative marketing that I can think of that were notable for their degree of failure were these:
(1) When AMD was burning the midnight oil to push the first Opterons out of the door and to bring x86-64 into the mainstream, Intel's PR response was to mount a nearly year-long, massive negative PR campaign that often amounted to precisely the following quote:
"You don't need 64-bits on the desktop." Short, sweet, to the point and incontrovertibly wrong.
First Opteron and then the A64 proved that mantra wrong, and then Intel itself placed the final nail in that particular coffin when it launched Core 2.
(2) When ATi struck out of the blue with R300 to leapfrog nVidia's discrete 3d gpu technology a few years ago, nVidia responded with a knee-jerk spate of negative advertising that was so pedantic, so intense, so acrimonious, and so erroneous that few of us who lived through it have forgotten it. And that negative advertising campaign lasted only so long as it took nVidia to stop talking about how "wrong" ATi's approach to 3d was when nVidia was finally able to bring its own similar products to market.
Neither of these negative advertising campaigns was successful, and in my opinion, both of these campaigns did far more to bolster the competition than they did to bolster the the companies that created and funded the negative PR.
Moral of the story is that negative advertising doesn't work and is a waste of time and money. So why do companies continuously from time to time keep repeating the same basic mistakes with negative advertising? Why not just forgo the negative ads and simply run ads accentuating the positives of the products you wish to sell?
I think that hubris plays a large part in all of this. Companies large or small are no better or worse than the human beings who run them. If you are a company who has been sitting at the top of the heap for a time then a certain complacency sets in and you begin to view everything that you do as "right" in some fashion, and you tend to see your competitors as "wrong" and you reason that this must be so because you are so much more successful commercially than they are. And so naturally, when the other guy, or the "little" guy, manages to blindside you with a product it had never occurred to you to make, then the immediate apprehension is that he's "wrong" somehow or else he has "unfairly" usurped your rightful position in the scheme of things and upset the apple cart through some mysterious and obviously dishonest machinations you haven't yet been able to figure out...
And so the negative ad campaigns begin to flow freely while you scramble to understand what he saw that you did not. So that's one explanation for negative advertising that I think is all too human. The fact is, though, that the real fault was your own, since had you not been so enamored of your own imagined market position you might very well have seen the very thing he saw long before he saw it himself.
To that end, you have two different types of companies: innovators and milkers. Now, certainly, all companies both innovate and milk the technologies they bring to market. The difference between companies, however, is one of degree. Some companies spend most of their time innovating while other companies spend most of their time milking. And there you have it. The milker thinks that the "right" way to do things is to spend 20% of his time innovating and 80% of his time milking, while the ratio may well be the reverse for the innovator.
It's long been my opinion about AMD as a company that it has never had the luxury to spend most of its time milking as opposed to innovating, and so the great spurts in its fortunes have come because of this necessary emphasis in corporate philosophy on innovating as opposed to milking. I also think that with its new-found success versus Intel with Opteron/A64 that AMD became a bit too comfortable with that position and began making assumptions about Intel's competitive intentions that perhaps it should not have made--and I think that AMD was perhaps remiss in slacking off on its Phenom development when instead it should have been accelerating it. I think the lesson has not been lost on AMD, that the price of success is eternal innovation, and I think this renewed philosophical emphasis within AMD as a whole is being demonstrated again at present with these new ATi gpus to be followed later this year with its newer 45nm Phenom cpu product lines. The lesson here, I think, is that while imitation is a sincere form of flattery indeed, there are some traits your competitors have that it is best to eschew if at all possible...
