The Most Hypocritical Smoke-Blowing of 2008

Rahul Sood of HP/VoodooPC occupies a pretty central roll in our industry as one of the most vocal and well-known voices from the boutique community.  His is a compelling story, from entrepeneur to big business, and that resonates with a lot of people.  But, man, has that gone to his head.  Be it self-indulgent soapboxing about the automotive industry or a diary of his exploits with extreme RC helicopters and monster trucks, Rahul has perfected the art of highfalutin.  I can look past all of that, but the recent hypocritical grandstanding about innovation in the gaming PC market just hits too close to home to ignore.

Rahul's recent blog post cites the changing economic landscape and decrees that "adapting" to current market conditions is the only way to survive.   Always insightful, obviously HP/Voodoo is following this course, so Rahul goes on to allude to what this means by talking about the death of the high-end, value for your dollar, etc yada etc.  If you cut through all of this Jobs-esque smoke and mirrors, what you get to is that is HP is releasing a new mainstream/value gaming system at CES and Rahul wants you to be really excited about that.  Heck, I'm very interested to see that product, and I agree whole-heartedly with the model (after all, this is not a new topic for anyone in the PC industry, including myself).  But, wow, how does Rahul write a puffed up post like this, completely ignoring the realities of his business as it currently stands:

Rahul: "The gaming PC as we know it is doomed... There was a time when a gamer would slap down his credit card and buy a maxed-out configuration just to eke out a few more frames per second."

Reality: It's only been a few months since Voodoo put out the $10K-$13K Omen, which is probably the most expensive consumer PC in the world.  I recently called it one of the most irrelevant systems in the industry today, and apparently Rahul now agrees with me.

Rahul: "There was a time when selling high-end hardware was easy, because we believed in it. Now we’re retooling and retasking our configurations so they make sense; let’s face it, high-end hardware has delivered diminishing returns in terms of value... The PC with four GPUs, a 2-kilowatt power supply, 16 gigabytes of memory, and a stack of hard drives is all but distant memory, at least for the PC gamer."

Reality: HP/Voodoo is right this moment selling machines with four GPU's, a 1300watt PSU, 8GB of memory, and 5 hard drives.  

Rahul: "Yes, some cataclysmic changes are coming in this industry.  For those of you wondering what will happen to the boutique space, I would suggest that unless the boutiques see the light, there won’t be much of a space left."

Reality: Voodoo is no longer a boutique, so Rahul's going to call the whole boutique segment lost.  Nevermind that many boutiques have been selling into the mainstream, with thoughtful configurations, for quite a while now.  Please don't decide that you're going to change your tune, Rahul, then call it innovation. 

The doublespeak is unbearable.  This isn't the first time, and I'm not the only one who's had enough of this stuff (Nate from NordicPC wrote this scathing piece earlier this year about Voodoo's "integration" into the larger HP).  But, hey, at least Rahul knows that he can always get a job at Apple.

Update:

Details for the afformentioned market-changing product have been "leaked" to Engadget.  The gist is this : It's small and it's got dual MXM graphics cards.  A decent config in a good looking, small package.  I love the size, but... MXM graphics cards are expensive, MXM-on-desktop boards are non-standard (expensive), and it's watercooled.  This is all says to me that this isn't going to be a real solid price/performance product, it's more of a relatively-powerful-in-a-small-package-but-not-cheap product.  In other words, a laptop without all the benefits of a laptop?  The way Rahul writes, this is the only product in the HP/Voodoo portfolio that actually matters in this market... good luck!