cM :: MORLEY|DIGITAL

One of the differentiators that companies, be they integrators or AIB (add-in-board) partners, use in the PC tech business is their warranties.  And like the herd mentality that’s so prevalent in this business, what one does that’s even slightly successful is quickly duplicated by the rest.

In the AIB business, soon lifetime warranties became commonplace, and even “double lifetime” warranties.  For companies that merely slapped stickers on boards manufactured by someone else, there was little else they could do.

When I spoke to other AIB companies that resisted the option to go to lifetime warranties, their response was simple: “It’s not a sustainable business model, period.   And sooner or later it will come back to bite you in the ass.”

Seemed plausible to me and applicable to the integration side of the business.  PC components will fail.  No matter how much testing you put into a system, you simply cannot predict when a component will go bad over the life of a system.  But it happens.  And when it does, if the system is under warranty, you have to fix it.  And every time that you pick up the phone, replace a part, or send a tech out, that costs you money.

It costs you money to have someone answer that phone call, answer that email, or schedule an on-site tech - and then you have to pay shipping for the part or the system, pay the on-site tech, and then wash, rinse, and repeat if something goes wrong.  Anyone who tells you that they never have to go through this is either lying or hasn’t been in business that long.  Props to EVGA doing the right thing and reigning back in on this.

So when you see a company offering ridiculously low prices, infinite number of configuration choices, and then claim to offer superior customer service for several years free of charge, think twice.  The simple fact is this is unsustainable.  If you do not make enough money on each machine you build to support that customer and future customers it will catch up with you.  Offering infinite configuration choices will compound the issue.  And adding more and more years to your warranty free of charge will bite you in the ass.  I’ve seen it happen.  I’d say ask Monarch Computers if they hadn’t already gone out of business.

Well, we did it - kicked our first Windows 7 systems out the door.  What a helluva feeling.

Rewind nearly 3 years.

I had just jumped back in, headfirst, into systems integration when Vista came out about 6 months later.  Leading up to that I had to juggle doubling production volumes with becoming an OEM partner.  This meant a whole new world of pain as it pertained to deployment and a new set of responsibilities to Microsoft.

I remember getting up really early to switch over the configurators to include the new Vista SKUs.  We were all pretty excited!  A new, fancy OS with a new release of DirectX and new features including Digital Cable.  And sales were doing well!  Then a funny thing happened - people started saying Vista sucked!  We were scratching our heads as we knew that OUR systems didn’t suck - they had fast processors, lots of RAM, fast hard drives, and were extremely stable.  Heck, we even won a few awards!

But unfortunately, when you’re just a multi-million dollar corporation, what you do in a marketplace dominated by multi-billion dollar corporations simply cannot overcome public perception.

The large, multi-national Tier 1s continued to load crapware, bloatware, and shovelware into their PCs, all the while driving prices down by using hardware from the lowest bidder.  Laptops, with already slow mobile HDDs, were RAM starved with 1GB - making the Vista experience unnecessarily painful.  I know, I bought a cheap, throwaway laptop during that time in an emergency situation.  It came with 1GB of RAM.  It was awful.  Throw in 2GB of RAM and it became a new machine.

It was these “captains of industry” that ultimately screwed Vista.  Sure, it had its flaws, and plenty of them.  The problem, however, was that it wasn’t idiot-proof enough for the multi-nationals, who designed to price, not to performance.  Thankfully, Microsoft has stepped up the game, big time, and you’d really have to be a few short of a six pack to screw up a Windows 7 system design.

The bottom line is that Microsoft Windows 7 is the finest consumer operating system on the market, period.

And thanks to Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA, along with cheap memory prices, the hardware out there gives the Tier 1s no excuse for any PC to deliver the same lack-luster performance that many commodity configurations delivered in 2007 and 2008.

With all the momentum that Windows 7 is getting, you’re going to see a resurgence - not just of the PC, but of the boutique.  MAINGEAR will be leading it, you can count on that.

A little over three years ago I wrote an article summing up some of our experiences at [H] Consumer entitled Fear and Loathing in Lost Business. It was about the cut-throat PC market and how companies were succeeding and failing in a crowded niche.  That was about a month before I jumped back into the business myself, scoring a Director of Product Development position at fairly prominent boutique integrator.

If there’s anything that’s for certain, it’s that nothing stays the same for long in this business.  Since then VoodooPC has been bought and shut down, and OverdrivePC was acquired as well.  And Asus started to compete with its customers by introducing their own brand of laptops into the retail channel.

There was much gnashing of teeth because Asus, as one of the precious few ODMs that designs notebooks for the whitebook market, was bringing to market products that directly competed with their customers of said whitebook market.  It didn’t help that Asus-branded books usually were thinner, better looking, and better spec’d than the scraps that Asus fed the channel.  The Asus C90 is a good example of a piece of crap getting handed to the channel while Asus kept the good designs for themselves.

But I digress.  The other day it was brought to my attention that Asus was going to be bringing to retail a pre-built gaming system (If you’ll notice, this system is built in the same plastic toilet chassis that I have talked about on a couple of occasions) - the question posed in the email was “Is Asus a Supplier or a Competitor?”

Well, clearly Asus is trying to be both.

Should we, as builders of high performance, custom gaming computers be worried about this?  No.  What we do is so much more than the sum of the components.  What we do is focus on customer service.  Anyone can build a computer.  Few can build a business around building a high quality computer at a fair price and offering peace of mind day after day to their customers by building a rock solid reputation for quality and performance.

Just ask Shuttle.

Shuttle used to make mediocre motherboards.  Then they began to make these nifty little small form factor barebones kits that sparked a revolution in the industry.  Before long everyone was building Shuttle small form factor computers.  They sold so many that Shuttle decided it’d be a good idea to get in on the action and start selling pre-built systems.  So how’d that work out for them?  Well, nobody uses Shuttle barebones kits any more, and Shuttle doesn’t exactly bring home the best reviews.  And they’re not known for their customer service.

So it’s much more important to be able to stand behind your product and support it than just bring out the next Alienhead at a cheap price.  In the long run that is what is going to make or break you.

MAINGEAR will continue to use the best components on the market because that is what will best serve our customers.  We won’t cut off our customer’s noses to spite our competition’s face.

If that means we will continue to use Asus motherboards (amongst others) in order to get the best performance out there, then we will.  We bucked the Corsair trend and went with Kingston due to vastly superior product quality.  If we need to move away from Asus we will do so because we think it’s good for our customers, not because we want to get back at Asus (they wouldn’t care, believe me.)

And if our next Editor’s Choice Award comes from beating the bloody hell out of an Asus gaming PC using Asus’ own components, well then that will make the win that much sweeter.  ;)

A Phenom II X4 processor without a model number?  TWKR? 42? What does it all mean? The answer to life, the universe, and everything? Well, AMD culled these parts from their Phenom II X4 line that are supposed to overclock beyond the capabilities of the Phenom II X4 955.  They hand delivered these parts to us and we’re going to put them through the ringer.  Will they come out the other side as something truly special?  Should Dirk Meyer sign these before we put them in a system?  We’ll let you know as soon as we put them through our brutal Redline validation process…

Pics and more here!