This is a reprint of a post I made to the Open Graphics Mailing List:

I had mentioned earlier that I've been tied up with the business
aspects of the OGP, and I thought some of you might be interested in
hearing about what's going on and have some discussion on it.

Our research indicates the best potential for success is with a
two-pronged approach. One is to sell an ASIC in bulk for embedded
systems, and the other is a PCB-based version for retail. As such, we
have turned our attention, for the moment, to the embedded market
where we and others feel that we can sell the highest volumes. To
compete in that market, of course, we will have to develop an ASIC.
As such, that will likely be the new primary direction of the OGP.

The retail graphics board will be affected such that the board will
now sell with a much lower retail price. Furthermore, we're looking
into the idea of selling the retail board through partners who
specialize in that so as to further reduce the price. The result will
be a MUCH less expensive retail product. There is also a likelihood
that we'll have greater freedom in terms of power consumption versus
speed.

At the same time, we don't want to leave behind those who would like
to tinker. In any case, we will have to design a prototype board, and
so our plan is to sell that as a product in its own right. Some
changes to it include possibly separating the host controller out into
a separate chip so that you can reprogram the main FPGA as you like
without affecting your ability to reprogram it again. Putting it
another way, the prototype will be designed with features that lend
themselves more effectively towards experimentation. The lower sales
volumes of this product will increase its cost relative to the
original plan. If, however, we get higher volume than expected, the
price will go down, especially for bulk orders.

While prototypes and experimenter versions of the board will likely be
identical, they may or may not have the same sale price. There will
be more than one prototype board, because we'll support various
interfaces including PCI, AGP, PC/104, and some others used in
embedded systems. (PCI Express will be a follow-on; we expect to use
an external chip to help with that.) We need to guage how many
prototypes to make for the initial build.

Comments and discussion are welcome.