Creative takes axe to Europe

.... the best place to start would be your driver developers. FIRE THE LOT! Start over... PLEASE!!!!

From all my years experience with Creative, going back to the early 90's. All I can say is, will the last person leaving Creative please turn out the lights..... We won't miss you, and good riddance! Creative is a company that has no business existing!

Well if they had maybe focused a little more on driver and software support I would feel sorry for them. I currently have an X-Fi card and with driver/software problems swore I would never buy Creative again.

So, bye bye losers.

we the creative users have been telling creative since the xfi fiasco that if they dont clean up their act, provide good drivers communicate with the consumers, and just be a good company, otherwise they will see themselves dwindling away. 
And the best thing out of this, other companies have been created because of what creative has done, business men saw that creative was depriving the consumer of decent customer service and reliable good products, so 3 companies steped up to the plate, and filled that void. 
I dont like to see business struggle, but creative had it coming to them, And I hope this shakes them up, and we may just may get some decent drivers, and affordable products.
I would still support them if that happened, all I want is a good driver, a good priced reliable high end card. and communication to tell me whats coming next instead if we ask a question in the forum we get banned, even for just saying when are we getting a decent driver for your crappy Xfi

Getting hardware to work can be frustrating, but actually, my X-Fi works fine.

Dual-booting XP and Vista. Latest 2 drivers are rock solid, no issues whatsoever with full EAX HD via ALchemy brought in hardware to Vista. 
In our clan I realized some folks dont patch the game plug their headsets into wrong jacks, OC the CPU so that it overheats or have 70 processes open in task manager and then blame sound card, graphics, whatever for everything including your mom's diarrhea, greenhouse effect and that odd blue screen on the genuinely pirated copy of Windows XP and whatnot. 

Meanwhile X-Fi can be grabbed for some 50 bucks, the PCI express version came along and drivers for both were reportedly ironed out. 

Normally I trust what I read on the Inquirer, but several facts in this article is not correct.
The majority of the European employees have not been let go and the ones that where, were let go end of June, not end september. Creative basically centralized marketing in France and PR in Italy and moved from a regional to a divisional sales setup in Europe. The organisation is also not lead from Ireland alone, but also Denmark and UK
We actually have more sales people and much stronger focus now. 
The organization we had was built around soundcards and did not fit our new markets. This new organization do. We simply where to fat for current markets, so even though it has been tough, we needed to loose some weight. I firmly believe we are going towards better times in Creative.

So Inquirer journalists, check your sources before publishing.

Atrocious customer relations and a shocking misunderstanding of what the market has needed over the past decade. Such a shame, and such a waste of some very obvious opportunities - Creative's management has nobody to blame but themselves.



Creative has left the building

I suppose you are Taiwanese. You write better than many merkins, but you still have a few points to improve - grammatically that is.

For instance, when you say "several facts in this article is not correct" - the is refers to the facts, not to the article, therefor you should say "several facts in this article are not correct".
However, let us let the grammar issues slide since the most important thing I wish to retain from your blurb is this : "The organization we had was built around soundcards and did not fit our new markets."

If you truly are a Creative employee (always a doubt on the Internet), then that makes it official then, Creative doesn't give a rats' ass about sound cards any more. That certainly explains a lot about the driver fiasco.
Thanks for the tip, Mr. Employee. I sure hope your Creative future will be bright and shiny, but it'll be without me.
Good luck.

Thanks for pointing out that obvious mistake, must have been tired when writing the initial post.

Again, the dangers of posting on the internet, is that people always read what they want to read, not what you actually post.
I have not touched on support of soundcards or even sales of soundcards. Yet, you read the post as we are closing down soundcards completely.
Fact is that our product mix has changed radically from when our old organisation was introduced in the mid 90's. Back then the vast majority of our sales was soundcards, coupled with a few other products.
Now the majority of our sales is MP3/MP4 players and speakers, which clearly calls for a completely different sales and marketing structure.
The focus on soundcards has not become less with the new organisation, don't know if you noticed, but we launched a number of audio products over the last 3 months.
During my time in Creative I have only seen improvements with drivers, but as you might know, this is also the most driver intensive products we have. I am not making excuses here, but audio drivers are by far the most challenging to develop and still the ones that are most prone to errors in the OS. I personally have had no issues with the cards, I have had over the years, except for a few minor bugs that has been corrected.

They now all cost £12-18 for a small pair of powered speakers. If they would make stuff for a reasonable price it might sell.

They need to look at licensing their tech onto motherboards, might get some revenue that way.

Ob-board sound is 7.1 channels now, and with HDMI by the video card the need for a seperate sound card is surely going the way of the dodo.

I wont be satisfied untill they go bust. Then maybe something good will come out of the vacuum.