In this industry, talk about the products and companies tends to hide the efforts put behind those products. While the war of words between ATI and nVidia, AMD and Intel, Google vs. Microsoft is all fun and games, there are people who we expect to answer ASAP regardless of the time zone we're in.
At Bright Side of News*, we decided to do something unusual - name the people we are working with and give credit where credit is due. In order for a person to be nominated for the monthly recognition, we are looking for the following qualities:
- Professional
- Responsive
- Proactive
- Creative
- Persistent
- Agile
- Fair
As we are working with dozens of PR managers spanned across the globe, we don't think that there is shortage of names that just might get a little credit back for all the work they did with us.
The answer to whom should receive our first recognition, for a month usually known as a very slow one - was quite simple. Recently, one of the online publications discovered an issue concerning ATI and HDMI drivers. According to the first information, the issue was that if you disable ATI's "Digital HD Audio" driver [and lose the HDMI Audio capability], you should gain a 2-5% performance boost. Suspecting the potential driver overhead, we did our own testing and started to talk with AMD on multiple levels, with folk in Canada, USA, Germany etc., but the person that stepped up to the plate most was AMD's PR manager for the SouthEastern Europe, Mr. Ivica Stankovic.
We ran our own tests and they were somewhat inconclusive, but then we received word from Ivica with numerous questions about our test results and then he provided us with his own tests that he ran over the course of the weekend. PR's role is usually to report the company official stand, not to frenetically run tests over Saturday and Sunday on each and every part of hardware that he could get a hold on.
That's exactly what Ivica did - he ran ton of benchmarks and in the end, we managed to pin-point the issue. In the end, the issue was resolved.
Ivica didn't try to feed us corporate BS, nor vigorously defended his company stance, claiming that something is wrong with us or our methodology. Rather, we enjoyed in a spirit of constructive discussion.
We have to admit that this issue was good refreshment from the sea of PR managers which attack us for our findings, rather than checking what's wrong with the engineering teams or even run the tests by themselves, like Ivica did.
Hence forth, Ivica Stankovic from AMD gets our first PR Manager of the Month award.
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