Spat between Asus and Gigabyte boils over

ASUS HAS become quite a behemoth. The branded operation alone, without OEM operations, chalked up some US$ 7 billon worth of sales last year.

But being big has not diminished Asus' sensitivity to smaller players' shenanigans.

So, when Gigabyte, fixed a big press junket in Ole Taipei recently to compare its "inventions" against those of Asus, and spread some dirt on its bigger competitor, what was Asus to do?

It does happen that industry players organise "media events" with the purpose of showing "facts" and such to denigrate their competitors, or throw accusations.

AMD's events last year were often attacks against Intel and we all know about chief Nvidian Jen Hsun's recent bouts of mud-slinging. But a Taiwanese vendor staging open, public proclamation of war against another one - and bigger one at that?

But it seems that one of our famous US journo friends from an even more famous US web site, wined and dined by Gigabyte, hopped over by taxi that night: straight from the dark grey, gloomy depths of Chung Ho City to the sunny northern suburb Beitou where Asus is headquartered.

Theo covered the journo side of this embarassing mess for Gigabyte pretty well on TGDaily. But what's the real story behind this unseemly spat?

No, it is not the one-off EPU power consumption "invention" battle, as much as Gigabyte - and maybe Asus - would like you to think. Nor is it really about whether you got a true 8-phase or now true 16-phase (Asus just announced it) power design on high-end mobos.

Also, it's not on who put an extra PCI-E bridge or switch on board to add more physically large (x16 form factor) but lane-starved - i.e. bandwidth-crippled - I/O slots. MSI did that too, by the way, and there seems to be no quarrel with them, at least not to this level. Neither do you see, for instance, fights between Asus ROG and Foxconn Quantum Force teams - the two high-end mobo groups seem to respect each other.

The animosity between Asus and Gigabyte seems to go deeply, and across the markets and regions. Even here in Singapore, being a major global electronics and trade centre, we've seen Asus complaining about Gigabyte's unfair ads against it, then Gigabyte complaining about " someone's" exposure of Gigabyte board EMI problems, and so on - and that was over a year ago.

So, we come to Asus'response to the matter of the press junket, published Friday.

These are the critical paragraphs:

It has come to our attention that a certain Taiwanese Motherboard Manufacturer has made false claims against ASUS motherboards. These claims have given rise to false information being communicated in both the mainstream media and technology channels. ASUS wishes to clarify the issues and so avoid any further confusion.

After investigation, it is clear that this company in question made use of a sponsored gathering of local and international media to deliberately spread information that we consider both untrue and without credible verification. This disinformation is not only extremely damaging to ASUS but also completely misleading to the consumers.

ASUS reserves the right to take legal action against any individual, organization or corporation which creates or spreads such rumors.

This heralds a sea change in the way big Taiwan companies, usually press-shy, will handle the journalistic affairs in the future. On one side, us hacks, analysts and other tricksters of the trade will become far more important in the island's vendors' brand-building battle, as they transition - not all succesfully - from OEMs to worldwide brand names. Do expect more "fun" events of all kinds, colleagues.

On the other hand, they'll become even more careful on whispering all those secret things, whether it's showing you the latest AMD roadmap, or ranting on the boss, not to mention the competitor - especially if it's not too late in the night for you to still hop on a taxi to that competitors' office.

Finally - because, for the first time, we're talking about a possible big lawsuit against Gigabyte. The pentup frustrations and tension are there.