After weeks of speculations, Dell announced yesterday that it was acquiring Alienware. Just in case you are not familiar with Alienware, it’s a gaming computer company that started in 1996 in a garage by two entrepreneurs (it seems that all successful computer companies are started in garages!).
It’s a very lucrative deal for the founders that’s for sure and I am sure that with Dell’s distribution system, they will be able to sell more of their gaming computers.
Alienware’s success should inspire everyone doing business in a very competitive industry. The computer field is a very tough place to do business in. Margins are low, competition is intense and the speed of technological change is as fast as you can get.
What’s behind Alienware’s success?
In a word? Focus on a core concept. Instead of creating and marketing computers to everyone, they chose to focus on the computer gamer. Ultimately, computer users who needed high performance processing power (designers, video editors, music producers) started buying their desktops and laptops.
Focus is a powerful business strategy. It differentiates your brand from the competitions which makes it more remarkable which attracts publicity which generates more sales and these high sales create market leadership in the category you chose to compete in (gaming computers).
The leadership attracts more media attention and more sales and ultimately a nice offer from big companies such as Dell.
It’s not hard to imagine that ten years ago, people told the two founders, current CEO Nelson Gonzalez and President Alex Aguila that they would go nowhere because their market was so small.
However, the sacrifice of not appealing to everybody paid off, big time. Let’s just hope that they do not lose focus and blur what makes them different and become yet another computer manufacturer.
