Andrzej's monthly column #4

Column

Column: Attention hamburger sellers!

If you run a small hamburger restaurant and MacDonalds opens up in your town - then it is time to start selling Persian food. Your only chance for survival is to be selling products that the major American stores CANNOT touch - using hard to find ingredients - for an audience that Ronald and his friends are unlikely to start catering for anytime soon.

[Hold on Andrzej. This is Hardware Info, not Burger News -Ed.]

OK.

But the analogy works really well for hardware too - honest !

[I will believe you for now - try not to end up in Guantanamo Bay! -Ed.]

Dell, HP and the major high street computer stores like PC World and Media Market can sell billions of Euros worth of PCs, notsbooks, software and accessories. Local stores cannot possibly compete. At least, they cannot compete by selling EXACTLY the same kind of product to exactly the same kind of customer. You local stores need to work in a much more difficult place - and I do not mean ‘half way up a mountain'.

Difficulty is your best friend and complexity is your cousin. Weird hours are also someone you should fall in love with, marry and have loads of children. Why? Simple.

Dell, HP and all of the major stores want uniformity. They want similarity. They want simple, shrink-wrapped, never-go-wrong, available in millions sameness. While Dell have done a decent job of getting closer to the gaming market with their XPS range of systems, they still look like ‘your dad dancing at a disco'. Something about the products that they ADVERTISE is just not ‘cool'.

(Koen would want me to point out that the chassis is actually very good - and that all of the components that I am about to ‘chew up' can be upgraded. I am focusing on what they actually offer - because THAT is what the small vendor can fight against!)

For example, the ‘Ultimate Gaming Rig' they advertise in the UK comes with an Intel E6300 as standard. It is also shipped with XP (no Vista option - which I guess you can understand given the current ‘driver fun' that everyone is having with Bill Gates' latest Me2 operating system), but it will be pretty useless for running Crysis. Surprisingly, it does not come with a monitor as standard. More surprisingly, there is no option to add a 30" screen for 2560x1600 action. Hardly ‘Ultimate' if you want to experience Oblivion like never before!

Their choice of memory is also a bit worrying. Unless you look for upgrades, it ships with just 1GB of standard DDR2 memory. Games like Battlefield 2 moved the minimum-memory bar to ‘at least 2GB' almost 2 years ago - and the early versions of Stalker (seen by the press), failed to run at all on 1GB.  Small vendors can differentiate here, by offering the 2GB that gamers are looking for... as standard! OK - you get the picture.

If the buyer is smart enough to force a load of upgrades - then they can get a good specification on an XPS box...   but the standard spec is weak. That weakness can be exploited to attract sales queries and - ultimately - sales !

The question has to be, why don't more of the smaller stores work harder to create the products that ‘extreme' people actually want?

When I ran marketing for a UK system builder called MESH, we won more awards for our hardware year-after-year-after-year. Dell and the other big boys could not compete. In fact, after ‘slapping Dell around' for a couple of years - they simply refused to send machines in for review at al. :)

Small operators can win - but they MUST get the specification 100% right! You can't counter the Big Mac with a Big Mick (simply by taking the seeds off the bun). It is more complicated than that.

Selling a small form factor system? Shuttle boxes are nice, but a small system reseller might be able to differentiate themselves by using something like the Silverstone Sugo chassis. It takes a regular PSU. That means products like the CoolerMaster iGreen series (with an efficiency rating of almost 90% on a 266w draw) can be used. That PSU has a 120mm fan - so maybe you can fit something like the GeminII. This unit sits so close to the underside of the PSU, that you do not need to fit a CPU fan. That is one less power draw within the system - and less noise! The best reason for choosing such a set-up, is that HP and Dell will NEVER go to this trouble. Also, you will not find such high-value products in the major stores. There are a million other options out there which the big guys will not touch.

Here are some predictions on what to stock if you want to keep the big bad Americans off your back:-

• Coolers from Scythe and Zalman
• Processors faster than an E6300 - and offered with ‘cool cooling'
• Power supplies with a green rating of near 90% and massive output, from companies like Seasonic and SilentMaxx
• Hard drives like the Raptor or Deskstar 7K500 for performance and the economical Samsung Spinpoint series if you really love your ears

More than anything, you also need to look at chassis. Whether you need simple black efficiency from Akasa, monster space from the Stacker or the kind of ‘weak in the groin' brushed aluminium that only comes from Silverstone's homage to Marantz... the chassis is an area where small SIs can blow the big boys out of the water.

But looks are not everything. You also need to think clearly/cleverly about after-sales support and your ability to deliver a recovery solution that really makes sense. Could be as simple as installing a spare (hidden) drive with easy-2-use regular backup software... ...but wouldn't your customer think it was much cooler if you installed a RAID array with hot-swap drives sitting in easy access bays?

Overall, when you are trying to keep ‘the beasts at bay', water-cooling has to be the ultimate weapon of choice. No multi-national is going to feel comfortable shipping a system with a load of water sloshing around inside. They will be extremely worried about warranty issues - not only from possible spillages - but also from the increased likelyhood that the customer will try to overclock their components (Doh!). Local vendors can hand-hold customers through their system set-up, explain the various methods for topping up the liquid used - and even sell them special ‘inert compounds' that will not cause a reaction - even if they spill everywhere.

Small integrators need to ‘marry' difference. They need to worship complexity as their new God.

If you are a local system builder/reseller - please take the time to go through Dell's latest advert - then spend a day walking around the major computer stores making notes.Everything you see - every component that they offer - is exactly what you CANNOT SELL IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE.

When MacDonald's hits town...    it's time to start selling home made Kabob !

Andrzej Bania is Marketing Director for OMEGA SEKTOR which is a Cyber Theme Park with almost 600 PCs and Consoles. Previously, he ran PR & Marketing for ATI in Northern Europe and, before that, helped run the UK's number 1 award winning PC manufacturer.