Creative Technology Ltd. is a listed manufacturer of computer multimedia products based in Singapore where the firm was initially founded by Sim Wong Hoo (born 1948) on June 1, 1981. It has some 4000 employees worldwide. Sim still acts as CEO of the company. The US subsidiary of the company is known as Creative Labs, Inc.. It has become known as the "Microsoft" of the sound card industry, having inferior products compared to competition, yet superior marketing strategies enabling them majority market share and ultimately the ability to buy out virtually any competitor.

The company began as a computer repair shop, where Sim developed an add-on memory board for the Apple II computer. Later, they started creating customized PCs adapted for the Chinese language. A part of this design included enhanced audio capabilities, so that the device could produce speech and melodies. The success of this audio interface led to the development of a stand-alone sound card.

In 1987 Creative released a 12-voice sound generator sound card for the IBM PC architecture, the Creative Music System (C/MS), featuring two Philips SAA 1099 chips. Sim personally went from Singapore to Silicon Valley and managed to get RadioShacks Tandy division to market this card. The card was however not successful and lost the competition against the AdLib card which was using the Yamaha YM3812 chip (also known as OPL2). This was probably because the Creative card had only rough square-wave sounds without filtering or interesting envelope control, while the Adlib was an expressive minature music synthesizer, more suitable for sound effects in games.

After this failure, another attempt was made with the Sound Blaster, a card featuring the same chip as found on the AdLib card and with additional digital audio capabilities for playing and recording digital samples. Creative used clever marketing tricks, like calling the card "stereo", while only the C/MS part offered stereo, or calling the sound producing microcontroller a "DSP", presumably to make people believe it was some sort of digital signal processor, in order to increase the appeal of the device. This card soon became a de facto standard for sound cards in PCs for many years, mostly by the fact that it was the first to bundle what today is considered as part of sound card functionality: digital audio, onboard music synthesizer, MIDI interface and a joystick port.

Currently their most lucrative products are probably the Creative Nomad/Creative Zen digital audio players, which competes with iPod and other players.

Products

Creative is known for:

• Sound cards such as the famous Sound Blaster for the PC.
• Gaming sound systems
• CD-ROM and DVD players and controller cards
• Graphics cards
• Web cameras
• Digital audio players (MP3 players) under the name of Nomad and Zen
• Prodikeys, a computer keyboard-musical keyboard combination
• Optical Mice and Keyboards

See also

• AdLib
• Aureal
• Yamaha

External links

• Official Creative site (http://www.creative.com/)
• Official Creative Open Source site (http://opensource.creative.com/)
• Yahoo! - Creative Technology Ltd. Company Profile (http://biz.yahoo.com/ic/42/42766.html)
• Silicon Valley InfoZone - Creative Labs (http://www.siliconvalleyinfozone.com/companies/creative.html)
• USA Today article on Creative (http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/2004-06-28-sim_x.htm)