Creative - long overdue losses reported

I think this is long overdue:

Creative, which is facing an uphill battle against the Apple iPod, reported a
net loss of 114.33 million US dollars in the three months to March, reversing
the year-ago profit of 15.91 million dollars.

This is overdue. Creative speakers are never recommended on any forum. Their X-Fi cards create incompatibilites with the nVidia nForce4 chipset by refusing to share resources. Whether it's the motherboard manufacturer's fault or Creative's fault, Creative was later, they should have worked around the problem. Well it's their loss - the people who bought motherboards with nForce4 chipsets, who are actually the main target segment of the X-Fi enthusiast sound cards, didn't bother much with the X-Fi.

With the entire enthusiast community not bothering much with good sound cards anymore, instead relying on the SPDIF digital audio bypassing the analog audio circuits and leaving the external amplifier to handle the digital to analog conversion. Why bother with a good sound card, actually? If you want good sound, the external amplifier's digital audio receiver circuit would be better than any, or at least at par.

The flash memory market is a huge casino, with odds of price drops far higher than price stability or price increases. And Creative actually builds MP3 players, though in form a `build to order' model, yet offers their channel price protection. Distributors are not fools. It's a crazy decision to stock flash-based MP3 players without price protection.

To compound the problem, Creative makes MP3 players in all the colors of the rainbow - and that's a recipe for a huge inventory problem. This is however, an insidious problem, and is difficult to trace from normal performance metrics.

What next for Creative? Man, I don't know. They don't pay me to consult! But it has to be this: they have to get better people into management. People with really current market and web feel. Multidisciplinary people, and people who are proof of the politics. Outspoken fearless people. And Creative gotta do it really quickly.

But for a company with still so many millions in the bank (est. US$250M ???) it's not difficult to reinvent itself IF IT WANTS TO. So many current opportunities now, including new netphones, web engines which Google left out, a platform for mobile audio, A2DP speakers, etc. Why bother to fight the brutal MP3 war if the result is already settled years ago - Apple won.

Ego has a lot to do with it. Ego is good, but in this sense, suicidal.