There's nothing that pleases me when one of the little guys drops out of the race. If TMTA declares bankruptcy tomorrow,
Ch11 won't happen.
Moreover, TMTA inspired Intel to design a more competitive solution for the low power market, and that has helped them competitively a great deal.
Indeed, in the past 2-3 years, I often had to think about the purpose of Transmeta. Often I ended up seeing the only purpose of Transmeta being the creator and tester of new products and markets, upon success the bigger sharks would enter.
I still remember Microprocessor Forum 2001, in which Dave Ditzel totally slammed the Pentium III-M with misleading graphs and data in order to make the Crusoe seem much better than it really was. His attitude during his presentation and the Q&A must have inspired something fierce from Intel, because Banias came out a year and a half later. Needless to say, at Microprocessor Forum 2003, he was a lot more humble.
Now I also dislike misconduct, but here I have to defend Ditzel with a bit of history. Before their IPO Transmeta was a pure research company with a lot of time on their side. Crusoe at that time was a try, a test, an experiment. Somehow there happened to be a bubble and Wall Street told Transmeta, if you don't go public now, even with an unfinished product, the window of opportunity will be closed for many years. So they did their IPO, too prematurely and without decent revenue and future.
Now after it happened and they made a lot of money, they actually had to get serious with their biz while being to young and too small and lacking the marketing and experience to be successful. So, how to get enough attention to survive? Yub, go against Intel, bash them, make noise so everybody gets interested. The problem only was, they drumed too loud and it became their death bell.
Sure, it came across arrogant and cocky, but what other chance did they have? I am not trying to defend cockiness as such(but I think Transmeta should be allowed to be since what they developed is incredible).
It was necessary for the Crusoe product to do that and find OEMs who would buy it. However the Efficion is a very good product that should stand on its own, not so much drum beating needed. But Intel is a bit too paranoid.
Even from the beginning, I found the concept of a VLIW core with x86 emulation a little ambitious. A product of this complexity is almost sure to suffer from launch delays, and sure enough, these have plagued TMTA through most of their business. Even this year, in which they were supposed to ramp Efficeon, it seems that they have made very little headway. There are still barely any laptop designs out there with an Efficeon processor, and those that exist are in such low volume mobile markets that they couldn't possibly find enough end-users to make themselves profitable.
Well, it is ambitious, but they handled it well considering what resources they had. Actually one has to really respect them for what they pulled of being so limited compared to Intel. You sure are right speaking about Crusoe, it was unfinished, it was their first product, naturally everybody makes many mistakes with the first product etc.
HOWEVER, you are wrong when it comes to Efficion. The reason why Efficion is not seen anywhere is purely coming from Intels pressure. They are making it very sure that we hardly seen any Efficion product in shops. It is not because mistakes on the execution side of Transmeta. How can an ant stem an elephant?
Investors in TMTA should realize this, instead of hoping for speculative swings because of fluffy product announcements or marketing spin. Each person makes their own decision on how to invest, and I respect your opinions, even if I disagree. I still wish you good luck in your other endeavors, and hopefully you've diversified.
Don't you worry about me, I am just an anonymous figure on a stock board. And I tell you for sure, you can even make a lot of money with bankrupt stocks being long. Furthermore, sure, I am well diversified and even a total loss in TMTA won't kill me. However, I still like to see more from this stock, not for money reasons, but because only with this stock I feel sympathetic strangely.
I am pretty sure of one thing. In Q3 or Q4 latest, we will see a buyout or merger of some kind. And the technology of our little company will be in more powerful hands. I am sure it won't be Intel, or would you sell to the company that stacked the dagger into your heart? And then, this could create a worse situation for Intel compared to the former scenario of letting Transmeta survive on its own, cooking on a small flame.
s.
AI
