AMD's corporate culture and asset lite analyzed

If we compare AMD to Nvidia or Intel, it is easy to see what is actually going wrong with the company. AMD's culture was explained to us as the sludge, often seen in countries such as Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, and Greece…: divulging the responsibility for past, current and future projects to a level where it is be impossible to tell who was responsible for the project that what went wrong. Result - responsible people stay, scapegoats get pink slips.

In the past two years, we listened to numerous partners complaining about the projects that were started, effort (time+money) was put from the partner side, but it all suddenly stopped. "Sludge" was the term we heard from several industry partners, from AIB/OEM/Distribution to Software/FAE side. Partners complained that the representatives that they were working with simply shut their computers off at 10 to 5PM or 5 to 5PM.

One of people we asked for comment is still an important partner to AMD commented on Radeon HD 3800 launch: "We worked hard on launching a product that would cater to the enthusiast market segment. However, seven days before the launch, we were still waiting to receive anything from them. No blueprints, no dummy boards, nothing. How can we compete with goblins [Nvidia], when their partners launch enhanced products on [sales] week one?"

That launch was subject to a lot of criticism from a lot of vendors, but it got silenced by a TLB bug and cancellation of Phenom 9700 part. Another partner did not have kind words while commenting on one office in EMEAI region: "I cannot believe that they hired a MarCom person that does not speak English. What is going on in there?”