When the reveal the information about SEGA the whole leadership team should have been on a plane to Japan the next day, all to apologize bow and scrape.
And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.
And trying to make your own board in that moment, was just an incredible self own.
They knew it was a matter of time before their advantage eroded. I think what really did them in was DirectX, they stuck with Glide and allowed NVidia to develop a proper implementation of the new Microsoft thingie which was heavily marketed to developers. Their moat became a prison.
They simply didn't focus enough on the next generation chip.
ATI built their own boards too at the time (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_R100_series#/media/File...), so the strategy of wanting to control more of the value chain doesn't sound that misguided to me. Not sure when ATI stopped doing that - was it after they were acquired by AMD in 2006 or before?
If you listen to the Computer History Museum interview, many of these providers jumped ship.
Also the bought a board provider that wasn't very successful, and their resulting boards weren't very successful either.