@Paul
If I remember correctly their original sound cards/chips were a massive success including 5.1 decoding etcetc.
Can't say their sound devices were a failure, just dont understand completely why they stopped, maybe it was standing in the way of monopolising graphics industry I dont know.
but you can't tar Nvidia with such a brush without even glancing at the horrors from other camps.
Intel made the i740, that was the last decent graphics to come out of that camp.
Ati's drivers became unusable when they added opengl capability
I had a 4mb xpert@play at the time! :)
Ati's Rage cards................I am not going to say anymore as I still have nightmares.
Matrox, seemed to refuse to try and keep up, and became specialist, the amount of patches you had to apply to programs and games just to get them to work with matrox cards was amazing.
Some games almost had their own matrox version.
via/sis et al, well they filled what intel fills now market wise.
and finally, at least Nvidia are taking the hit.
Fujitsu just pulled out of the desktop hdd market when their cirrus logic chips had hot dates.
and the electrolyte scandal also cost me and many others much money, when even well respected vendors got caught out with bad capacitors.
any incorrect grammar/spelling is purely down to me being a foriegner :)