Elite Bastards posted an interesting article on the future of Creative Labs and the sound card market. Here's a bit:

It's always seemed to me that, when it comes to their sound board business, Creative have ploughed a lone furrow, paying little heed to what the industry around them is doing. There's no doubt that the X-Fi is a fantastic piece of hardware, but its lack of particular features is most definitely starting to hurt its sales. More and more enthusiasts and audiophiles want Dolby Digital Live encoding and the like, and its something that Creative can't currently deliver. Now that other companies have also managed to beat out Creative in the analogue audio quality department which audiophiles crave, it spells disinterest from a large section of their target market.

Then there are other issues, such as the state of Creative's drivers, bloated and unwieldy that they are. Despite many years of complaints about the sheer volume of software that is installed and set to run on start-up during an installation, little seems to have changed. Throw in the far from impressive frequency of driver and software updates, and again you have disillusionment. Enthusiasts like their shiny new drivers, even when they don't particularly need them - A lesson already learned by ATI, and now NVIDIA in the graphics market.