14 DAY TRIAL // While Advanced Micro Devices has published its financial results for the past quarter, NVIDIA revised its expectations for the one that will end on January 29, 2012.
That is to say, NVIDIA does not yet have financial numbers to hand out, but it can still paint a picture of what one may expect.
Apparently, the Santa Clara, California-based company is not going to be quite as successful as it thought it would be back in October.
Where it once expected $1,066 million / 816.67 million Euro, it now foresees $950 million / 729.59 Euro.
One reason behind this downward adjustment is that the Tegra 2 mobile processor business took a dive even faster than anticipated.
Ironically, the might of the Tegra 3 platform worked against NVIDIA's better dreams.
Since Kal-El promised such a high performance, those who would buy Tegra 2 tablets decided to hold off until the successor came.
Not that NVIDIA didn't foresee this, but it did not think the plunge in sales would happen quite as soon as it did.
The other reason for the revision of financial expectations, and apparently the greater one, is the hard disk drive shortage.
Fewer HDDs mean fewer sold PCs, desktops and laptops alike, which means, by extension, fewer sales of discrete and add-in graphics cards.
For those unaware, Thailand suffered severe flooding late last year, leading to many HDD facilities getting shut down. Western Digital was severely affected.
Hard drive prices soon skyrocketed (though now dropping again) and the shortage is expected to last throughout most of 2012.
NVIDIA is not the first company to attribute a decline in business prowess to the HDD issue, and it probably won't be the last either.
Hopefully, there won't be any further disasters. One might say that 2011 more than filled this decade's quota of mortal and economy-damaging events.