When a company, country, or team is led by someone affected with BADD they usually end up turning a corner they wish they never had. There are many examples of BADD in our industry and they almost always end up with unfavorable, sometimes devastating results.

Take for example NVIDIA. Many years ago they thought they were unstoppable, their products were excellent, ATI was way behind, and they didn’t expect a change to come. BADD hit, and ATI just skated by (I’m talking way back when the Radeon was introduced). It most definitely wasn’t ATI’s ability to execute better than NVIDIA that put them in the lead; it was NVIDIA’s own BADD that caused it to happen. Since the failure of the 5800 (way back when) legend has it that Jen-Hsun Huang had a major internal meeting with his team where he openly recognized the company failures and humbly stated “never again…”

Remember when Intel was in a similar position? Intel thought AMD would never break the mainstream – in fact, Intel never even mentioned the “A” word ever, it was like they never existed. BADD set in and ultimately AMD beat Intel out of a few major contracts. During the lengthy beating of Intel I can only assume that the engineers at AMD truly felt that they were well ahead of the game.

Judging by current events one might assume that some sort of BADD set in somewhere at AMD because they entered this new war unprepared.

A few years ago a mild form of BADD hit Voodoo. We assumed only a few competitors in our space would remain. We were under the assumption that Voodoo would grow with few challenges. It seemed that out of nowhere new companies began coming out of the woodwork. Many were just little guys with big heart – although some of them did not possess gaming DNA. Then larger OEMs jumped in and validated the space. Thankfully we didn’t stay blind for too long, and now we’re in a fantastic position.

In February of 2005 Kevin Rollins was quoted as saying...

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