News that AMD is restructuring its graphics division is the latest in a very long line of business decisions intended to get the company back to profitability. This is a company that, since its Athlon 64 heyday back in the mid-2000s, has struggled to compete with the relentless innovation at rivals Intel and Nvidia. That's not to say AMD hasn't had a few innovations of its own—its APUs and the recent launch of high bandwidth memory spring to mind—but its market share (under 20 percent in both CPUs and discrete GPUs) and profitability continues to dwindle.

Market share isn't everything of course; just look at Apple's ever increasing profits for evidence of that. But for the past few years that's what AMD has been chasing, by placing unusual bets on hardware that takes years to come to fruition, and disappoints when it finally does. Bulldozer was built to serve a massively multicore future that hasn't yet arrived, while GCN, the company's GPU architecture, bet on parallel efficiency when the DX11 gaming world remained serial. The latter of those bets may yet still pan out for AMD thanks to the launch of DX12, but the damage to its bottom line has already been done.

It's a similar story across the rest of AMD's product lines, with server chips that can't compete in terms of sheer performance, and laptop chips that are behind on power efficiency. It hasn't helped that, since the retirement of co-founder and CEO Jerry Sanders in 2002, AMD has gone through four different CEOs, each with different takes on how to run the company. Hector Ruiz wanted to take the fight to Intel on performance; Dirk Meyer wanted to own the data centre server market; Rory Read famously had his "five pillars" (ultra-low power devices, embedded, professional graphics, semi-custom, and dense servers); and current CEO Lisa Su wants to drop the "cheaper solution" label AMD has been plastered with.

Rapidly changing CEOs isn't uncommon at large corporations, but the changes in direction have led to mistakes. SeaMicro, which was purchased for $334 million (~£215 million) as part of Read's foray in the dense server market, was unceremoniously dropped at a cost of $75 million (£48 million) earlier this year. What must have been a rather large pool of resources was spent developing the Mantle API to make better use of the company's GPUs—and while its development has helped shape Vulkan and DX12, Mantle didn't bring in the cash. There's also the Heterogenous System Architecture (HSA) Foundation, headed up by AMD, which was started to make better use of the company's APUs like Llano, Trinity, and Carrizo, but so far hasn't produced any compatible software.

You'd think, then, with the mistakes that have been made in the past—the jumble of directions that have pushed AMD from hardware maker to software developer to standards foundation—that there'd be some humility in how it sees itself, and how it presents itself to world. And yet, AMD is out there, calling out its rivals for alleged dirty business practices, and aggressively hyping its products to the point that when they do show up, there's more disappointment surrounding them than there otherwise should have been. Fiddling benchmarks and declaring "sabotage" does the company no favours, detracting from what are otherwise impressive engineering achievements.

AMD obviously has some skilled and talented staff. There's no doubt that HBM is the future of memory, and that Fiji is a powerful architecture. Both will create healthy competition with Intel and Nvidia. But new technologies like these are being done a disservice by a company that lacks direction—or at least, that's the impression it gives—and a roadmap for the here and now. More than that, this is a company that seems to have completely lost touch with how to present itself to the outside world.

There's been some controversy recently, surrounding AMD's range of Fury GPUs. When the Fury X launched, some hardware sites were unable to get hold of samples in time for launch, with KitGuru claiming that it was left out because AMD said it had a "negative stance" towards the company. Fast forward to the recent launch of the Fury Nano, and several sites have come forward asking for help in tracking down Nano samples, unable to get hold of them from AMD. To be clear, while this invites criticism that doesn't necessarily need to be there, AMD can decide on whoever the hell it likes to review the Nano.

What isn't appropriate behaviour from AMD, however, is taking to Twitter and implying that sites are being left out of the Nano party, because they write unfair reviews. This is particularly galling for The Tech Report, which produces some of the most detailed and accurate graphics cards reviews on the Internet. More than that, by calling out certain sites this way, it reflects badly on those that did get a sample, implying that they were part of the chosen few because they'd treat the company more favourably. While Taylor has since apologised for the remarks, his Twitter account was mysteriously closed over the weekend, with Google's Web Cache serving as the only evidence it once existed. Does this indicate a change in direction for the company?

(In the interests of fairness, we should point out that AMD isn't the only company to make questionable PR decisions in recent years: Nvidia's CEO essentially saying that the GTX 970's 3.5GB memory issue was a clever feature springs to mind.)

Regardless of AMD's future plans, Taylor's comments are just the latest in a string of gaffes and outlandish statements that have damaged the company's reputation. Following a few years of PR mishandling, it is now becoming very hard to believe anything AMD says.

After we wrote about The Witcher 3 GameWorks fiasco earlier this year, AMD continued to speak out on GameWorks, while dragging its feet on an official fix, which came about only after an enterprising user found a solution first. Before that, Project Cars got thrown under the bus by AMD after Roy Taylor backed accusations that the game was built on a version of PhysX that intentionally ran poorly on AMD cards. Developer Slightly Mad Studios later replied to the comments, suggesting that AMD hadn't supported it during development and optimisation.

Being the underdog in an industry of giants, the inclination is to give AMD the benefit of the doubt. But the more it kicks and screams and cries foul at every aspect of the industry—from competitors, to developers, to the media—the more it pushes them away. We all want an exciting, competitive industry, but more than that, we need a truthful one. AMD needs to take a good hard look at how it speaks publicly, because right now it comes across as little more than a panicked company on the verge of a meltdown.

There's no denying that AMD is in trouble in some respects: it needs solid leadership, a roadmap that it can actually stick to, a public relations rethink. Ultimately, I just hope that AMD isn't as panicked as its ever more outrageous public comments might suggest, and that it actually has a path back to credibility plotted out--for the sake of its products, if not its staff.

Editor's note: Ars Technica UK has not received hardware samples from AMD. Our Fury review sample was provided by Asus. Furthermore, AMD declined to comment for this article.