Ex-Epox employee spills the beans

Some five and a half years ago I moved from a scientific role in a polymer company to take on the challenges associated with working for a hardware manufacturer. I was a PC enthusiast with a great deal of excitement and drive for the technical edge of hardware with an ambition to make my hobby my job. Times were good in the whole of the hardware industry and everyone was making money – companies existed even just for the sake of existence. My eyes were wide open and the whole thing was so different to what people actually think drives this industry, you don’t realise just what goes on from say a chipset being released from a vendor to a manufacturer to the product development to the product sampling in BETA to the first production run and hasty air shipments of product from the factory to your local branch offices warehouse to it being sold to the distributor and then to the retailer and eventually ending up in the hands of the excited end user. A lot of effort goes in, in years gone by this effort was effort-less given that margins could be as high as 75% or even 100% and companies were able to put copious amounts of people in teams of development for any given product.