| Daniel_K - A CREATIVE Story |
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 Author: Matthew Bradford
Editor: Chris Hunter Creative Labs, famous for the trademark SoundBlaster name among many others, falls to a knee after more than a decade of domination. David and Goliath could not have been retold any better. However, this is Daniel, and then enters the Scottish armies from the movie Braveheart. The story revolves around a computing enthusiast from Brazil named Daniel Kawakami. He was able to "fix" the issues that were previously thought to be errors within Creative's driver suite under the Windows Vista operating system. After completing his own driver set, he released them for some time on the Creative Labs forums. Company VP Phil O'Shaughnessy publicly threatened Mr. Kawakami despite his helpful intentions. The VP posted an admonishing letter in the thread where Daniel was discussing and releasing his driver fixes, found at message 6 of the 2,411 posts. Daniel himself posted an interesting response that can be found at message 9 on the same page. In this official response, O'Shaughnessy states: "By enabling our technology and IP to run on sound cards for which it was not originally offered or intended, you are in effect, stealing our goods." O'Shaughnessy further seals the fate of this incident by continuing to say: "If we choose to develop and provide host-based processing features with certain sound cards and not others, that is a business decision that only we have the right to make." These statements combined with others made during the VP's warning instigated an online riot. Customers loyal for nearly 20 years have gone on record as saying that they will never again purchase a Creative Labs product. Some enraged proprietors went as far as to purge their shelves of Creative Labs products still in stock. Following Daniel Kawakami's curt warning, enthusiast-centric hardware wholesaler Newegg.com reacted to the community, officially posting a response to an estimated 5000 return orders for Creative products in just a 24-hour time frame. Click here to view a copy of this response copied to the AMD Processor forums. Creative Labs forum moderators have removed the original post. Creative responded with a corporate boilerplate response. They neither accepted blame nor addressed the purposeful crippling of the "Vista Ready" sound drivers. This bland response enraged the public and the enthusiast community, spawning several websites dedicated to boycotting Creative's products outright. While most sites have been shutdown, a petition still hails here, offering a chance to join the ranks of disgruntled Creative customers or outraged enthusiasts at large. Creative Labs has taken a hit in recent years; selling their Singapore HQ building to an anonymous buyer for a sum near 180 million USD. The financial graphs show the added results of this recent PR disaster with a 13% loss in stock value in the last month and the continuation of further decline for the once innovative audio hardware company.
Despite their losses, Creative is still paving the way, releasing their XiFi-2 sound card, which has questionable profitability at this time, as suspense hangs over the fiscal losses of this potentially damning event. The success of this product is dependant on how Creative handles damage control. In addition, Creative will have to regain the trust of a disgusted and broken community by properly dealing with their past decisions in marketing and morality. The story of Daniel Kawakami and the audio technology heavyweight is epic, and in this case, the community has spoken. Articles, blogs, and posts have spread across the web like wildfire. Wired blog network posted articles highlighting the lack of response post-event, and an informative and revealing article where Kawakami himself speaks out. He talks about the events that have taken place, his own decisions, and what he found deep inside Creative's labeled "Vista Ready" software. Take time to read the multitude of comments from angry and disgusted customers below these articles. Seeing the energy created by the disenfranchised brings the whole picture into crystal clarity. Creative has made an enormous mistake. All too late, Creative Labs has succumbed to the pressure of the community following the outcry of customers and newcomers commenting in the many threads started on the Creative Labs forums. The company has given the green light to Daniel Kawakami to provide an approved list of repaired drivers frpm those he created. However, his original work is undoubtedly available via bit torrent from various tracker sites. Few news sources following this story have had much to say in defense of Creative's actions. The idea that they have made their intellectual property and marketing a sham of deception has caused much discussion on the limits of IP or intellectual property. Have they gone too far? Planetx64 responds to this question in an article found here.
It is difficult to ascertain where the Singapore based
sound hardware will go from here. We will continue to cover this story, as it
is still evolving and continuing. The battle is far from over between Creative and
the Customer.
              
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