[Fury]

Source: DailyTech

[Turambar]

  less companies makes less competition, which makes higher prices

[Descenterace]

I predict that in ten years there'll be about four major companies in the field of computer hardware. Ten years after that, there'll only be two or three.

I doubt there'll ever be a monopoly in that field, though. ATI and nVidia have been neck-and-neck for years.

[Turambar]

that neck-and-neck has brought us some really nice graphics cards.  now AMD had to throw the whole thing off balance by buying ATI

[Apathy]

They're both very good motherboard companies, hopefully they'll keep it up.

[Kosh]

Maybe Asus's support will improve now.

[Mars]

Somhow I doubt that 

Did anyone notice how the total employee count of the AMD ATI merger was less than AMD's employee count according to wikipedia?

[Descenterace]

Maybe Asus's support will improve now.

Maybe Asus's boards will improve now. Along with their firmware and drivers.

[CmdKewin]

Did you actually read the article?
A "Joint Venture" is NOT a merge... Gigabyte will maintain 51% of the shares. they still will have control of the company. So we are still going to see branded names around, the only difference is that the motherboards are going to be manufactured at the same location. No big deal.