Creative screws up?

[jschild]

http://digg.com/hardware/Creative_s_fall_from_glory_Consumers_fighting_back

I personally haven't been happy with their drivers for vista (though to be fair, Vista pretty much screwed up all hardware sound support, TY microsoft for acting like its 1998).

But to do this.....it's just insane. I think we are literally seeing a company commit suicide.

[Tr1cK]

Suicide?

They practically have a monopoly on the sound card market. I used to just not care for them until they put Aureal out of business. Since then, I loathe them. I do use an Audigy 2 card still though. X-Fi is not worth it IMO and there isn't much competition.

[Kalos]

Stuck up idiots. The reason why Creative overpowered most of the sound card producing rivals back in the days of Warcraft II and such is that they had a wider basis of support. Now they're destroying that wide base by deliberately sabotaging thier own cards, crippling them so they can't run properly and necessitating yet another upgrade. There's a reason I've been against Creative these last few years: Rubbish driver support. But to think they would deliberately destroy the efforts of someone who actually managed to sort out thier aweful drivers and get the cards to actually work by threatening legal action? The guy should have been given a pat on the back, not threats from the management for IP infringement. Besides, if he coded his own drivers, and used no part of the original Creative drivers, then the point is invalid and would be throw out of court, they need to prove that he used thier often drivers somehow in his build.

But this kind of innovation is usually encouraged. I'm making sure if I pick up a new sound card, I'll check out the competition well before I get to them. (Don't mention Asus to Creative, they'll go nuts if someone treads on thier precious monopoly of high end sound cards; and believe me when I saw Asus are making some promising inroads)

[Xlorep DarkHelm]

Nah, Vista isn't worth it. Microsoft needs to release something that isn't such a stranglehold and resource hog.

[jschild]

But they don't own most of the market. The VAST majority of computers have onboard sound, not creative sound cards.

Creative was the choice of people who wanted better sound - but you have to buy their product. By doing this, plus their horrible Vista support, they are alienating those people who have to go out and buy their cards.

Now, its no more ATI nor Creative cards for me. Just sad when they cannot support the products they put out.

[Xlorep DarkHelm]

I believe it is more that Microsoft has made it painfully complicated to be able to support Vista. Potentially not cost effective due to Microsoft's goofiness and lame demand on what drivers can do (requiring a specific binary for a specific hardware chipset, no more integrated drivers), Microsoft really turned a LOT of the hardware manufacturers off from them.

[jschild]

I don't know of any other sound card maker having the issues that creative has. And the simple fact that ONE GUY made working drivers says volumes about the crappy support creative must have been putting into it.

[Xlorep DarkHelm]

I don't know of any other sound card maker having the issues that creative has. And the simple fact that ONE GUY made working drivers says volumes about the crappy support creative must have been putting into it.

Every driver producer for all hardware has had the same problems... Creative just decided to write it off, potentially as a protest against what Microsoft has done.

Have you noticed video card driver files magnifying in size considerably? Or that you have to download a binary explicitly got your card? that's because Microsoft decided that each chipset needs its own binary, and doesn't permit a single, unified binary build that encompasses drivers for all relevant hardware varieties that the manufacturers were producing, causing considerably higher bandwidth/download usage now for those manufacturers, and increasing compile/build times by a couple orders of magnitude.

Basically, Microsoft felt it was acceptable to treat the hardware producers like... well.... "brown mud" you might find in sewage. All so Microsoft can lock down Vista and make it more strongly-controlled (but honestly no more secure despite their claims). I'm so glad I don't have to deal with it, because quite honestly, I think that Vista will weaken Microsoft's stranglehold on desktop platforms, and this latest change has bolstered hardware support for other platforms, like Linux.