Frank Azor, co-founder of Alienware, describes how the company differentiated its customer experience in the late 1990s by offering fully turnkey PC setups.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.9s
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“We would actually tell customers they could send us their games, they could send us their joystick, their game pads, whatever hardware they wanted pre-configured on the computer, they can mail it to us. We would install and configure everything for them, so that when they received the computer, they just turned it on and all the work was done. It was a fully turnkey system.”
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Insight
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Opinion
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AssertionNot checkable as stated
Merchant processors held Alienware's revenue for 60 days over fraud suspicions
“And they'd be like, oh, we have to hold it for 60 days to make sure this is legitimate. And we're trying to run a business. We have to, you know, you have to buy parts, you have to pay yourself, you have to pay rent, you have to pay services. And yeah, they wo…”
Frank AzorDec 12, 2022▶ 40:00Alienware: Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Alienware harvested scarce 1 GHz AMD CPUs from brand new Gateway PCs
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Frank AzorDec 12, 2022▶ 41:37Alienware: Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Enabling direct online ordering scaled Alienware's sales to over 100 PCs monthly
“I think the inflection point was when we evolved the website so that customers could actually order it on the website instead of just configuring it. You know, and that is when things started going from, like, 20, 30 computers a month to 50, then 70, then a hu…”
Frank AzorDec 12, 2022▶ 44:56Alienware: Frank Azor and Nelson Gonzalez
AssertionSupported
Azor: Alienware initially competed internally with Dell's XPS brand post-acquisition
“Initially when Dell acquired Alienware, we were still competing against XPS gaming because XPS was their gaming brand.”
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