nVidia’s Danny Shapiro says all is well in Quadro land

We have had a firm heads-up from Danny Shapiro, nVidia's Head of Quadro Marketing to say that there may have been one ‘s‘ too many in a recent mailout that his company sent to its channel partners. We believe Danny's explanation and would like to confirm the exact details.

You can read the original story about nVidia slashing the price of all its Quadro cards by 50% here. Several of KitGuru's channel contacts were in receipt of the original email, so the source is unimpeachable. The actual wording of the offer also seemed to indicate that there was no limit on the number of cards that could be purchased, as you can see from this excerpt:-

Starting from now until Oct. 31st, 2010 PNY Technologies is offering you the possibility to discover and test the new NVIDIA® Quadro® Fermi based graphics cards by purchasing boards with a special discount of 50% :
• NVIDIA Quadro 4000 by PNY
• NVIDIA Quadro 5000 by PNY
• NVIDIA Quadro 6000 by PNY

We've placed the text in a nice shade of Quadro green, with the extra ‘s' in bold red. Our sources read [No pun intended – Ed] this pluralisation to mean that nVidia's channel partners could buy as many Quadro cards as they like, including the very latest, with 50% off the list price. There was no language to say that the cards could not be sold on to customers.

Here's Danny's take on the situation, verbatim:-

Admittedly this offer is confusing. The promotion is in response to overwhelming requests from our resellers and developers for demo samples. We have chosen to enable new resellers and developers to acquire a single “not for resale” sample at a discount off list price — this is a common practice professional markets.

This promotion is not available to the general public, and unfortunately propagating this outside the reseller and developer community has created confusion.

The launch of the new Quadro products based on the Fermi architecture is in fact the most successful in the history of Quadro. End user and reviewer feedback has been phenomenal. Please check out a number of unbiased reviews at http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_news.html then click the Awards and Reviews tab.

Danny seems like a nice guy, he has worked at the top of the workstation graphics market for many years, for both ATI and nVidia, and is considered by both sides to be one of the good guys in the industry 🙂

Want to see Danny in action, summing up nVidia in a single minute?  Click here.

KitGuru says: KitGuru has a finely honed moral code. In general, we like to publish all of the news that's fit to publish (and, yes, the bits around the edge when we get a chance!) as long as we have multiple sources or think the snitch that's blowing the whistle on the company they work for is motivated by greed and a need for fame – rather than a simple urge to pull legs. If any of the fine folk working for the major IT manufacturers ever feel the need to comment on a story (because you love it, hate it or just think that some part needs changing because it is inaccurate), then we actively encourage it and we always promise to listen!

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