Don’t you think OCZ betrayed itself long ago by abandoning so much and so many of what made it great in the first place just to adopt SSD after noticing Samsung and other South Korean SSD experts pioneering the new technology and new market?
It’s far easier and less risky to stand on top of what others have experimented for years. Mtron suffered a most cruel death, for example, though it was the only well-known large-scale supplier of popular SLC-based SSD beside Samsung. Apple killed iRiver, almost, by releasing iPod even though iRiver was popular and elegant years before when the first iPod was being conceived and the very concept of MP3 players was largely Korean.
OCZ was and has always been a company copying and reselling what others made just like many of the most popular computer part brands based in the US on eBay, Amazon, Newegg, Bestbuy, etc. OCZ was great because it was good at SELECTING East Asian suppiers that design and manufacture parts and sell them to OCZ at ridiculously low cost so that OCZ can make greatest profits. That strategy works well for many others like OCZ and the greatest example is Apple. Profits left for those producers in Taiwan, China, and South Korea are so small when you divide profits by the number of researchers and factory workers. OCZ failed because it no more concentrated on parts like DRAM modules, graphic cards, power supply units, etc. OCZ tried to force itself to believe they are SSD experts when most of that belief was based on nearly noting. What OCZ was good, better than any other company making SSD, at was selling words for marketing to be posted on websites like Anandtech. The good image worked well for OCZ for some years for some consumers that focus on the number of stars the reviewers give to each review. I didn’t.
OCZ could not control the SSD industry because it knew nothing about it, and none of the real leaders bothered. Even Apple and others on the very place OCZ was headquartered at did not buy SSD from OCZ.
It was a different story with Indilinx. But I have known hundreds, thousands of other South Korean “venture” firms that have had similar fates and some of them have been mentioned by members other than myself on this place as well. They have not been as successful as the likes the founders of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. But many of them are personally rich enough to last for life. The owner of Kakaotalk is one of them, leading a smartphone-based app with more than 50 million most loyal users, but the founders came from NHN of Naver which in turn was from a Samsung subsidiary. They create their own companies for profits, and only for profits, after gaining insights and access to partners and near secrets in the world of treading and technology R&D. Selling their company to OCZ was profitable for themselves, but the rest of OCZ also wanted to be sold to still another. They could have stayed at Samsung and none forced them to leave. They left merely to become another Facebook, another 29-year-old superhero worth US$2,000,000,000. OCZ and Indilinx had their chance and they failed, but they had successes enough, so I think that’s also justice, fair enough.
There’s always one question not answered here. You yourself (or yourselves) could have become an OCZ investor. Why did you not buy OCZ itself if OCZ was so great? And if you are not buying OCZ stocks, why do you expect much better informed people to do so?