[TikiTDO]

From my perspective, AMD really screwed up the AMD/ATI merger in the worst way possible. When AMD bought ATI they were well positioned to beat everyone to market to release their APU chip. However, the problems started almost immediately when neither AMD nor ATI did anything to combine resources. They should have put in the time and money to merge teams at all levels of the company. Instead they built a few small groups that included senior personnel from both units, then they left most of the lower level teams to work on whatever they were working on previously. Never mind the fact that there were a lot of really clever people all over the place ready to contribute really great ideas.

In other words, there was zero global direction down the ranks. It was just business as usual; keep doing what you've always been doing, and maybe we'll show you some nice slides a few times a year about how great APUs will be. This lack of organization meant that no one had any idea what anyone else was doing. Worse-- even if you wanted to find out there was absolutely no company-wide documentation or organization on anything. Your only hope for getting information was hoping one of your co-workers had bookmarked some magical page with the info you required. l This just got worse when you accounted for the problem of elitism. The hardware teams were just so much better than the software teams. After all, software is easy, so what sort of useful input could those code monkeys offer. And far be it from the software teams to actually talk to someone from the QA teams; those QA people were beneath notice. Finally, add in a very wide distribution of personnel seniority, insane levels of paranoia about job security, grade-school level office politics, and completely disparate management styles, then hit blend.

So really, the results are not at all surprising. You can't have two companies pretend to be one while playing tug-of-war, and still be competitive.

[marshray]

> They should have put in the time and money to merge teams at all levels of the company

How would forcing the teams to merge quickly rather than gradually achieve anything other than messing up everyone's development schedules?

[TikiTDO]

I'm not suggesting they should have broken up all the teams and made new ones. There are much smarter ways to merge teams that involve gradually easing them together. However, having five teams in the company doing nearly identical things is not "gradually achieving" anything.

If (big if) teams had development plans they had to follow, then those plans should have been adjusted so that eventually all these teams were working towards a common purpose. If you just leave those teams alone and hope for the best not only are they going to avoid any chances to work together, but they will often go out of their way to ensure they don't happen.

[qompiler]

Yes because teams are like liquids, just pour them in a cup and stir that stuff up. sigh

[oxide]

that's not what was said at all. sigh

[yuhong]

Not to mention that they did it just as Intel was releasing Conroe.