I had mentioned in my previous post that I’ve been a bit of a PC hobbyist since the late 90′s. Building my own machines, pulling my hair out when I invariably messed something up and had to start all over again. I’ve been clearing out piles of old PC magazines, including a rather bulky collection of Maximum PC which dates back to 1999. So of course nostalgia kicks in and I start flipping through some of the older issues, and I started to realize something. The actual specifications of PC components have become less and less prominent in just about all forms of marketing material.

There was a time when PCs were marketed and sold literally by the numbers. CPU manufacturers incorporated the processor speed right into the product names themselves. But a glance at an ad from Best Buy or Dell will reveal just how much this has changed. Processor speeds and cache sizes have been replaced with more “comfortable” features and benefits (space-saving, optimized, easy upgrades) and technology “microbrands” like Crossfire, Corei7, and BluRay.

The reason for this isn’t all that mysterious, and I think it represents a definite response to consumer feedback to the industry. The average consumer doesn’t really care what’s under the hood. Well let me rephrase that. Customers don’t care about the low-level details, as long as it performs for them as expected. As a PC manufacturer, this is a bit of an issue because you can’t continue to “wow” consumers with incremental increases in gigahertz or Terabytes anymore. So instead, you go back to basics. Focus on maintaining connection between the brand, and the consumer. The markets will sort themselves out in terms of who buys what. Hobbyists can still get ample information on component specs from any number of online sources, and when you look at it, they were never the primary audience for the major retailers anyways. What really matters is whether or not you (as a company) can recognize the difference between a message that says “We have a PC for you” and “We have YOUR PC”. Hobbyists are more likely to respond to the former. The rest of the world responds to the latter.

This is definitely the direction that the PC market has been heading in for a couple years now. The Mac camp of course has been doing this even before the infamous Mac vs PC campaign. Well, there was this guy too, but… that particular campaign didn’t last too long.

The same kind of shift has been going on in other areas of personal technology too. Consumer level camera ads speak more about ease of use than megapixels. Instead of listing off all of the bells and whistles, mobile phones are all about service plans and the different ways that you can connect with people once you get the device in your hands. Of course, improvements in technology will continue to make there way into successive versions of products, but it will be interesting to see if there will be another shift in the way that those products are marketed to us.