doing business is hard this days. you can't be just a rich a*hole while working with people. have to care about your image. and this is one of the ways of doing it. hanging out free stuff. sort of selfless donations. but in fact this rises the bar and makes competitors' life much harder. of course you can be rich and narrow minded, like intel. but then it's hard to attract external developers and make them believe in you future. nvidia's stock rise is based on the vision, investors believe in it. while other giants are being dominated by carrier managers. who know the procedures, but absolutely blind when it comes to technology evaluation. if someone comes to them with a great idea they first evaluate how it fits in their plans. sometimes they their own primitive vision, like in facebook. which proved to be a... not that good. so, all this sort of managers can do is look at what is _alrady_ successful and try to replicate it throwing a lot of money. it may be not enough. like intel still lags behind in GPUs.