Hardware sites will suffer from AMD, ATI shock

IF AMD succeeds in acquiring ATI you can be sure that the balance of power will change as the public relation teams at Nvidia and Intel assess their future strategies.

Everyone knows that PRs are fairweather friends of journalists, driven by column inches, ravenous clients and the need of the sales folk to sell, sell, and sell again.

The PRs at Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATI are contemplating their belly buttons because all four were ridiculously focused on so-called hardware sites. The times, they are a changing.

Every PR at each of these four firms has as her or his goal the aim to flog more and more chips, convince hacks to pass on the party line, and their bosses are those ever grim reapers, the sales force. Behind them, the beancounters are always watching.

Sales teams have little time for marketing and PR and little enough time for technology - they're driven by commission, commission and commission again. For these type of humanoids, the acme of success is to have a Porsche in their garage and a real Rolex on their wrists - for these types of folk, status is everything.

What's been very amusing for the last 10 years, however, is how naive and disingenuous hardware sites have been in the face of a phalanx of very highly paid PR professionals. The Big Four chip companies have expended endless shareholder dollars on wooing kids that have started hardware sites about the benefits of technology that in reality may well be dubious benefits indeed.

These four PR phalanxes have played on the "fanboy phenomenon" to get hardware sites into taking sides on matters which are better left to football supporters or street gangs, engaging kids in matters which have little to do with journalist professionalism, but more to do with banner ads.

Little wonder that Nvidia is laughing its socks off about AMD's putative takeover of ATI. The Nvidia PR team is a set of experienced professionals which could easily fend off questions from a Jeremy Paxman, never mind a 20 year old kid with a hardware site. Andrew Humber from Nvidia? Yeah, he's been around for a while.

That's not to say that ATI's PR team isn't tough too. The ATI PR leader, Chris Evenden, is a very experienced PR and his staff in Europe are pretty slick operators.

But does anyone in their right mind really believe that AMD will keep on a huge team of ATI PRs, when Hector Ruiz' byword is economy, economy, and economy?

Andy Grove had it right, commercially, when he commissioned the Intel Guide to the European Press so many years ago. Manipulate the journalist, divide and conquer, and you'll turn her, him or them into a tool of marketing and sales. And the sales force will ensure they turn the PRs to their advantage. The hardware sites will soon see the difference as industry PR consolidation kicks in.

It's high time young journalists at these hardware sites begin to understand that the PRs don't love them at all, or even a little bit, but merely want to exploit them for the famous column inches of favourable coverage. µ