| Sumario: | The multimedia revolution may be taking place slowly, but at least one area of the industry, the sound board market, is making profits, and it is dominated by a small Singapore company called Creative Technology. In 1988, the company's chairman, Sim Wong Hoo, went to San Francisco to sell his PC-based music synthesizer and found a market among personal computer game companies that wanted to add sound to their products to compete with Nintendo video games. To meet their needs, Sim created the Sound Blaster board, which works with more than 1,000 software programs and has sold more than 2.5 million units, becoming the de facto industry standard. At least 30 firms have jumped into the sound-board market. Most make clones and try to compete with Creative Technology on price. The Singapore company faces more serious competition from Microsoft and Media Vision, which beat Creative to market with a 16-bit board offering compact-disc-quality audio.
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