Wither Premium PC brands?

An interesting article on CNET contemplates what is going on with the Voodoo brand, which was acquired by HP in 2006. The brand has been much less active compared to, say, Dell’s Alienware brand (coincidentally, acquired by Dell in ‘06), which has remained fairly active by comparison.

When HP found Voodoo, Voodoo was a game system builder (that also happened to make some systems that were very capable of editing video.) Their claim to fame were systems that were highly optimized. Some features trickled into HP’s (numerous) other product lines, but unlike another HP-owned brand (Compaq), you’ll be hard-pressed to find any Voodoo references on HP’s Web site. However, Voodoo’s Web site is alive and well, with several HP stamps present, but there are only two products (the Envy 133 notebook and the Firebird desktop).

Alienware’s Web site is quite active by comparison; there are two base models of laptop and two base models of desktop. We’ve reviewed Alienware iron in the past and it has always been very solid; we wouldn’t expect that much has changed there. Dell hasn’t trumpeted that a lot of Alienware innovations have trickled into other product lines (e.g. Precision, XPS) but it seems like many have gotten there.

Have PCs gotten to a point where we don’t really need the premium brands anymore? We began noticing that several years ago, it got to the point where pretty much any computer off the shelf can edit video, though for the best performance (shortest rendering times, etc.) you still need to change the stock configuration to switch to a faster processor, more robust storage, etc. Luckily, this is not a big deal to pull off. (The lackluster economy is almost certainly not helping the case for a premium PC, either.)