Visiontek going out of business!!!!

Wow, talk about a major hit for Nvidia. Yeah I know, people don't "buy the brand" they "buy the chipset", but even so, that's one major manufacturer that's no longer making their cards, in addition to the ones they've lost to ATi. I'm sure some other manufacturer will step up to the plate, but as the article says this couldn't happen at a worse time for Nvidia.
 
This goes back to the OCZ PR where they switched to Radeon based cards...they stated the shelf life of Nvidia based cards was hurting them with 6 month product cycles and cost of tooling and marketing.
Somebody is making money but not the board makers..thats Elsa and Visiontek now.
 
Unfortunate, but hardly a surprise. Here is some information posted on another forum a while ago:

July-18
Okay. Straight from the VT employee's mouth.

VisionTek laid off about 250 people from their Gurnee production facility a short while ago.

Basically this was just about EVERYONE who wasn't Director/VP or above at the facility.

Contrary to some rumors, VisionTek is NOT retaining high-end card production.

They're going to be manufacturing retail cards solely in Asia. All the OEM contracts and all the production equipment from the Gurnee site have been sold off to a small production place, Total EMS (Totally A Mess) in Indiana. And yes, the play on the name, according to those who helped them set up, is quite accurate. This company is owned by the same people who own VisionTek, but is not, in and of itself, a VisionTek subsidiary.

Basically, VT is taking and flushing itself down the toilet. The owners/business managers simply do NOT have a clear business plan, and have basically sabotaged the one they were operating under by pushing production overseas.

Those who have not yet left, but WILL be leaving are:

Their Chief Engineer
Their Documentation Lead
Their Test Engineering Analyst.

Plus, they've cut their tech support (Help Desk) staff down to 1/3 of it's previous level. So wait times to techsup have jumped from 4 minutes to over two hours (and worse on Mondays). And their call duration has gone from 5 minutes to 90 minutes because people have so much trouble getting a real person that they won't let techsup hang up on them till the problem is resolved.

Also, for those of you who are seeing the VT cards with a Blue Orb-esque chip cooler, look elsewhere. It's not a Blue Orb. It's a cheap, shoddy knockoff (another managerial decision) and isn't exactly an optimal solution.

Also, instead of using actual thermal compound, they're using thermal adhesive (basically you'll need a hair dryer to get the HSF off without damaging the chip). And while OPTIMAL compound coverage is at LEAST 80%, they've been dolloping one little bead in the middle and dropping the HSF on. Resulting in less than 50% coverage by the thermal interface.

When the engineering and Q&A staff brought this to managerial attention, they were ignored, or worse.

Up till recently, VT has delivered a very good product at a good price point. However, VT seem to now have their sights set on a different goal.

Appearance on fuckedcompany.com


Well. You've been notified.
Click to expand...

July-23

The company was fairly small to begin with, but they have a positively HUGE "suit" population (10% of a company of around 500 people are VP, Director, etc).

What's worse, most of them are non-technical people. They're all marketing buffs.

So these jackasses, since they were too stupid to properly control a manufacturing business (like their double inventory lists, the one belonging to management being woefully lacking in information, so that there were identical entries for myriad parts of varying specs), decided it'd be a good idea to just become a marketing and distributorship for finished parts.

Never mind that Engineering and Q&A had numerous inexpensive ideas for EXTREME product differentiation (stuff that probably would have put VT out in front on OC'ing and features). They were routinely ignored.

When it was pointed out that an extra second or so taken to spread thermal compound across the GPU, instead of merely dropping a dollop on there and squishing the HSF down, would result in more stable, more OC'able systems, they were ignored and overridden.

Basically the company's head is trying to shove itself as far up it's own ass as it can.

And don't expect to see anything about this blurbed on [H], even though I submitted it with references.

According to my contact inside VT, Kyle's lips has an airtight seal on the ass of VT's marketing division. So when he gets news about VT, he actually calls them up, talks with marketing, and then deliberately avoids news that might make VT look bad.
Click to expand...

Yesterday:

Just got off the phone with my buddy who was at VT.

You've heard it HERE first.

They basically laid everyone off Friday. And all the people who were leaving with severance got fucked for their serverance.

The bank now officially owns VisionTek and is in the process of liquidating it.

Hell, the collapse already bankrupted one of VT's suppliers. When VT couldn't make the payments, the supplier folded.

Maybe now we'll see some coverage of the lousy aspects of VT from that knob-slobber Kyle, since he won't be getting anymore free stuffs from them.

Oh, and all those rebates on VT stuff you guys may have sent in for, or will see this weekend? Don't bother. The rebate company they were using stopped honoring those after VT stopped paying them.

So you've been fucked out of a rebate. Your one chance is to take the mail-in offer straight to BB and complain.
Click to expand...
 
Disappointing. more so that it seems VisionTek screwed its employees (fiuring the lot on 4th of July.. what a way to go) and customers with regards to severance pay and rebates.

What happens to customer support etc as well? I dont understand how the biggest supplier of NVIDIA based gfx cards can go broke in such a manner.

Does anyone have details of what business decisions killed VisionTek off?
 
misae said:
Does anyone have details of what business decisions killed VisionTek off?
Click to expand...

Manufacturing in the US?

I was suprised when I read that they had their manufacturing line here in the US.
 
Could be... interesting to note that Winfast are offering an NForce and a Ti4200 package for about the same price of just the gfx card here in the UK.

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/prod...19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=39089

Also the fact that ASUS was shipping Ti4200 with the same components as the Ti4600 range I believe (saw this posted at nvnews a couple of weeks back).

Didn't VisionTek make NVIDIA reference boards too?

Usually these kind of things are related.. I wonder if VisionTek owned a lot of NVIDIA stock.

I understand I am opening myself up to flaming, but my post is entirely speculative. Forgive me in advance if I am way off base.
 
If they'd played their cards right, manufacturing in the U.S. could've been a big boon.
 
Oh? How?

Visiontek has nothing to compete on but price. Manufacturing in the US is more expensive than China, even when including shipping costs.

So what would they offer?
 
Perhaps this 6 month product cycle deal is about to finally come to an end. Looks like it hurts more than it is worth. Read somewhere else this is one of the major reasons that many loyal NVIDIA based gfx card sellers turned to ATI, for example Hercules, Gigabyte et al.
 
My post above has some insight regarding their troubles, although admittedly from an employee prospective.
 
How would a 6 month cycle hurt a retail company? Assuming your managing your inventory properly and cognizent of upcoming products, there's (generally) not much bad about it.

New products for Christmas, with slightly improved products for Spring to give customers a reason to buy something in the off season.

Even in MP3 handhelds, we have our customers talking about fall/spring product cycles. Its not like it was something invented at NVIDIA, or pushed by NVIDIA (its the other way around!).

Before we blame anybody else for Visiontek going under, remember:
1) Slump in PC economy
2) Rising cost of manufacturing in US
3) Zero to differentiate Visiontek products from other products (which is more why I think Hercules, et al turned away from NVIDIA products. Too crowded a space)
 
How can a 6 month product cycle hurt?

When you have to retool every six months, rebrand, re-advertise and you find that their is apathy in the market magnified by the slump in the economy. Add to the fact that most sales are not new products anyway but low end products.

I am not blaming NVIDIA at all. They have nothing to do with VisionTek apart from selling them gfx chips.
But VisionTek were very close to NVIDIA and could have had a knock on affect for VisionTek. The Winfast deal I mentioned is a killer deal for the consumer but only brought on the fact that there is more stock than demand and Winfast need to move some inventory it seems.

I think the primary reason for VisionTek's failure are going to be bad management. Over-reliance on one particular product - coupled with manufacturing in the US when the economy is down probably didn't help either. In [H] page there is a small implication that there could possibly been something bad cooking at VisionTek too.

While this information does come from a very credible source even the information they had was a bit slim, but it was not ruled out that improper business practices was something that put the last nail in the coffin.
Click to expand...

This is probably in reference to the post made by Geeforcer earlier.

I'm just shocked, more shocked than when Elsa folded, that a company that sold the most gfx cards can go down in such a bad way.

edit: tags

And just want to add that this is of course entirely speculative.
 
Reply to (3) from RussSchulz post:

Hercules moved away from NVIDIA when they began to produce Kryo II based cards and NVIDIA began to shift away from Hercules, not vice versa. I believe one of the reasons why Hercules began to move away from NVIDIA products to sell Kyro II was price IIRC and, naturally, it isn't good business sense to put all your eggs in one basket. The move kind of back fired on Hercules initially as NVIDIA decided to, er, punish Hercules with not giving Hercules, one of the largest customers NVIDIA had at that time, priority over stock.

Exactly why the other manufacturers moved from NVIDIA to NVIDIA and ATI I don't know exactly. But it is easy to speculate why so I won't ;)
 
I think people underestimate Marketing costs, the company I work for spend Billions of dollars on advertising.
Rapid product cycles do hurt manufacturing and there is alot of good reasons why stated above, retooling costs, packaging.

I think Shelf life is the most important factor here...and what was the profit margin on board sales...how much Money was Nvidia asking for reference design and GPU's.
 
I don't want to get in a tit for tat over something as banal as the merits of 6 month product cycle in the retail industry.

All I know is all our customers do it, and they're all in the retail consumer electronics business selling into Fry's, BestBuy, Circuit City, Compusa, RadioShack, etc (Anybody like their new MuVo? I wrote the basic software for it).

But, onto other things. Does anybody believe that Visiontek going out of business has any real impact to NVIDIAs sales? I see see it as a consolidation: some other vendor will pick up the sales that Visiontek would have gotten. As mentioned above, nobody was actively buying a Visiontek product. They were buying an NVIDIA card--it just so happened that visiontek manufactured it.
 
While this information does come from a very credible source even the information they had was a bit slim, but it was not ruled out that improper business practices was something that put the last nail in the coffin.
Click to expand...

This makes me nosy. IIRC Nvidia just hired a top gun attorney just the other day. I speculate since that VisionTek was such a close collaborator of Nvidia if there is some sort of legal correlation.... of course this is pure conjecture, but if Visiontek is doing some foul strategy it may very well also include Nvidia as well. Why did Nvidia hire that posh legal representative is the question that’s popping to my mind? Food for thought … ;)
 
Sabastian said:
This makes me nosy. IIRC Nvidia just hired a top gun attorney just the other day. I speculate since that VisionTek was such a close collaborator of Nvidia if there is some sort of legal correlation.... of course this is pure conjecture, but if Visiontek is doing some foul strategy it may very well also include Nvidia as well. Why did Nvidia hire that posh legal representative is the question that’s popping to my mind? Food for thought … ;)
Click to expand...

No, Nvidia hired the attorney because years of ritualistic infant sacrifice to Odin (done primarily to inflate 3dmark scores via his divine influence) have finaly caught up with them. The fact that there is no evidence of this mass slaughter of newborns is yet another proof that Nvidia is in cahoots with authorities, and has used bribery and blackmail to insure that their atrocities have never been investigated. I suggest you look into that.
 
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