All Your PC Boutiques Are Belong to China

Well, it's finally happened. Alienware has gone the way of the Sood, and is integrating operations into Dell, "putting two teams together into one unbeatable team."  A lot of people will get really worked up about this and pontificate that Alienware is doomed and is losing their soul (or their "DNA", for the very savvy), etc etc. But the fact is that this is the industry now, and there's no stopping it.  If Alienware had a soul, it was gone a long time ago.  Area 51 was a hoax!

Yet the funny thing is, it doesn't even matter.  No one cares who builds their computers, as long as they get the product they expected to get.  PC's, even gaming PC's, are commodity products, and no PC company of any size is doing the actual system assembly.  Not HP, not Apple, and not even Dell.  It wasn't always this way, but it is now.  So, Alienware builds aren't even going to end up in a Dell factory, because Dell is selling all of their factories!

The real scandal here, though, is that both Nelson Gonzales and Rahul Sood told everyone at the time of their acquisition that they'd stay the same sexy boutique companies, except with all of the benefits of the big OEM.  Gonzales said "this acquisition [will] only succeed if Alienware is structured as a separate division," and that "you're not going to see a lot of changes after this announcement."  Rahul Sood said "This is a deal about innovating our product line, not our supply chain" and "Voodoo will remain in Calgary" and other funny stuff about products never going into retail.  The few customers who did think there was alien technology and voodoo magic inside those boxes must be really upset.

But you know what, the reality is that the Alienware business model, copied many times over, is a freakin dinosaur.  That's the elephant in the corner for everyone who is still trying to make money spinning retail components under a slick-looking brand.  This just doesn't fly anymore, because branding itself is largely impotent in today's markets unless your company is a force of nature.  The boutique market that was started when hardware enthusiasts were competing against bland Dell boxes is over, and every piece of the puzzle of building the high-end boxes has been commodized into off-the-shelf sku's.  Alienware and Voodoo are nothing more than stamps in the mold.

For that reason, I'm going to make the prediction that the top execs from both Alienware and Voodoo don't last very much longer at their respective big-box companies.  Whether it's the restless entrepreneur inside of them, or the fact that they just can't consistently create products that are actually viable for $100B companies, these guys will move on at the first sign of greener pastures.

However, there's still a market, albeit small, for companies that are service-focused in the boutique segment.  As long as people have to deal with screwups like Acer's Predator catching on fire, there will be people wandering the internet looking for the businesses that will hopefully provide them with a higher-touch, more personal experience.  If the remaining niche boutiques can concentrate their efforts on service versus trying to build a brand or pimping the hardware, they will be fine.