The Little Guy

I just finished reading a blog post from a PC builder and it really made me think about the differences between the big guys and everyone else. In the computer industry, we generally talk about "Tier 1 OEMs" and "Boutique Vendors" as the big guys and the little guys, however that is often misleading. Dictionary.com defines the noun "boutique" as:

1.	a small shop or a small specialty department within a larger store, esp. one that sells fashionable clothes and accessories or a special selection of other merchandise.

2.	any small, exclusive business offering customized service: Our advertising is handled by a new Madison Avenue boutique.

3.	Informal. a small business, department, etc., specializing in one aspect of a larger industry: one of Wall Street's leading research boutiques.

While some vendors may put themselves in "boutique" status with the first definition, I believe the second definition best corresponds to our view of a boutique PC vendor. I generally think of boutique vendors as small shops with personal service that steps beyond that of your Indian call centers. I would also like to think that they specialize in one aspect of the larger IT industry, usually the home user. They may even be more specialized and only work with the desktop form factor or only produce home entertainment devices. They almost certainly produce more reliable, more attractive, and higher performing equipment because of the personal touch they give to each machine they ship. This usually incurs a bit of a price penalty, but the experience is almost always worth the cost.

I wanted to bring this up, because I was reading about how a vendor gets stuck with old product sometimes, and they have to push it off on customers before they can sell the new stuff. This can get very hairy when you order components on the "metric ton" scale, and it is honestly a problem I am glad I don't have. Look at the surprise launch of the 9800GTX+ at $229. There are some companies that are sitting on hundreds of 9800GTX cards that have just become obsolete over night.

If having to sell a bunch of cards at a lower cost was the only issue then an OEM would simply sell their old cards at a lower price and gouge the new cards a bit to cover it. That is far from the case though. Beyond the standard hardware requirements, if you want to sell that new 9800GTX+, it will need a new driver. Microsoft will require you to re-certify any machine that uses that new driver through the Windows Hardware Quality Labs in order to stick that fancy "Designed for Windows" sticker on the front. No big deal, throw the card in a demo system, install the WHQL driver from NVIDIA, run some tests and you're good to go, right?

Well, this is where it gets really amazing. Say you want to use that new card in tandem with a fancy ATI TV Wonder Digital Cable device. All of a sudden you are looking at shipping the demo machine to Microsoft to get their blessing, and then to Cable Labs to have them bless it, each for a fee of course. I think I went over this before: Just a Quickie. Needless to say, your time to market has just gone from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. So while you'd love to be selling that 9800GTX+, you're stuck with last week's hardware.

The blog post I read was actually defending their company's time to market because of all of these factors, which I can totally understand. Most of the time, companies like NVIDIA ship out pre-production cards to their largest customers to help allieviate this, but sometimes you have to rush a product like the 9800GTX+ and the big guys just get stuck. However, just a couple of lines down, I read the word "boutique" being used to describe that same company, and I was pissed. If you order components on the "metric ton" scale, you don't get to be in that class, sorry.

That said, us little guys can get behind sometimes too when surprises get dropped on us because we don't always get the pre-production sample. It's not a secret that Nordic is almost entirely an NVIDIA shop, and this was for obvious reasons until this week. AMD has really hit us with a solid product in the Radeon 4870, even if it is way too loud and way too hot. While Goliath knew this was coming, us Davids are all having to rethink things, which is exactly what I'll be working on all weekend.

Be sure to check back Monday for the results...