Shuttle declares war on INQUIRER, readers, Fudo and... er, Via

HARDWARE VENDOR Shuttle appears to have lost its marbles and has made an all-out attack on the INQUIRER. But we'll be dashed if we know where Cameron Rogers is coming from in this as, far as we're aware, totally unprovoked snottogram™ below.

Nevertheless, Shuttle gains the distinction of being the subject of the 10,000th story to be published on the INQUIRER since we opened for business just over two years ago. We'll be cracking open the champagne on this red letter day! Many thanks to all of our readers, and to our advertisers too - including Shuttle - for supporting us. Sheesh! µ

Hi Mike,

You may or may not be questioning the reasoning for the break down in relations between me and Fudo. The problem is endemic of what I see is a willful biasing of both article selection and article content. The issue wasn't helped by the publishing of reader's poor opinions of the Inquirer's advertisers and the creation of the Inquirer subscription "ad free' site.

Perhaps the most frustrating complaint Shuttle has is the Inq's unflappably favorable coverage of VIA. Somehow, the Inq seems to have completely neglected to post any negative coverage of VIA over the past two years, despite the fact that VIA's revenues are off 60% during the same time. Intel has the P4 chipset sewn up, with VIA woefully behind schedule, and NVIDIA has made huge inroads into VIA's traditional SocketA dominance, to the point where the number of KT400A manufacturers can be counted on one hand.

An illustrative example is Shuttle's motherboard mix, while the company was first to market with KT266 and the first to bravely promote P4X266, Shuttle today does not even have plans for KT400A or KT600 products, and our VIA P4 boards have experienced so many delays that we are questioning VIA's relevance in this market.

In this light, you can see why Fudo's story regarding "Shuttle to make VIA Pentium 4 XPC" was the straw that broke the camel's back. VIA has made it clear that it does not treat Shuttle as a customer, but rather a competitor, and as a result Shuttle has committed to release P4 compatible MiniITX boards with Intel chipsets in the near future. Clearly this represents a dire threat to one of VIA's last marketable segments. With Fudo incorrectly reporting this as a story favorable to VIA (not to mention one that defies sense due to the current state of VIA's chipsets), and refusing to post the correct story, I can only conclude that the Inquirer is heavily influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by VIA.

As a result, we cannot advertise in good conscious at this time, and I greatly regret the loss of credibility of the one of the industries most impartial publication.

Cameron Rogers
North American Director of Marketing