Atomic: And with things like graphics cards generally getting bigger and hotter at each release, that kind of headstart must be handy.
Scott Richards: Well, what we're seeing happening is the market kind of splitting into three distinct segments. One is the high performance end, with gaming and serious graphics and even workstation-style applications, and that's always going to stay a desktop business. No matter how good laptops get, desktops are always going to be ahead - at least for the foreseeable future.
And then there's the middle market; where everybody talks about the growth of mobility and laptops - that's where a lot of growth is taking place. What a few years ago would have been a cheap desktop is now a cheap laptop or netbook.
Then, finally, the interesting part were we're seeing a lot of growth, particularly in some markets, are the low-end desktops, based on Atom, Nvidia's Ion, those sorts of things. The mini ATX market seems to be really taking off; I think there's a good market there for low impact processing applications like home media systems. And it's an ideal thin-client-like system, just for email and stuff. And that's a really good growth market for us.
So what we're doing is we're trying to maintain, keep, and grow our lead in the market, if at all possible; but this crisis has hit some of our competitors worse than others, and in crisis there's always opportunity.
Atomic: How do you think managed that? Why did you dodge the bullet, and others didn't?
Scott Richards: Because we've been in the market for a long time, and we're not part of that wild west mentality I talked about before. If there's a goldstrike in a market, like PSUs or whatever, some companies rush into it. But we've been in this market for almost 25 years now, since 1986. We've done power supplies from the beginning, cases from very shortly after; we've had a lot of innovations. If other people want to rush in - good luck to them, but it's a crowded market now. It's harder to be heard, and it's harder to differentiate your products.
Atomic: So if you live and die by innovating, how much R&D goes into making Antec cases, for instance?
Scott Richards: A lot! In some cases, we start with a prototype made out of cardboard - we glue it together, move stuff around, draw stuff on it... then we'll do a mock up in the factory, then do our testing. From there we go to the tooling stage. It takes a lot of hours and lot of back and forth.
Just getting into the case business is a huge expense; it can cost half a million dollars to hard-tool a new chassis. You do the math - how many do you have to sell to make that back?
Atomic: So what has been your best selling case over all?
Scott Richards: Out of every case we've ever made, the Sonata series. If you take all three iterations, it's sold millions of versions worldwide. Of the recent releases, the Nine Hundred has just been overwhelmingly successful - we've just sold so many of those.
Atomic: Why do you think it was so popular.
Scott Richards: I think it hit a real sweet spot in the market. It gave people just the capacity they needed; we had the bigger Twelve Hundred, which never did that well - most people figure they don't need that and it's too big for them. But the Nine Hundred and its successor, the Nine Hundred Two, for that market segment, for gamers, it's perfect.
The thing is, it does the cooling - and we developed the quiet computing thing like the Sonata - so when we came back to doing a gamer case, and we loaded it up with a lot of fans, we didn't unlearn everything we learnt making the Sonata. So one of the initial reactions to the Nine Hundred was people were surprised it was so quiet. They thought it was going to sound like some aeroplane test hangar or something, and it wasn't nearly as bad as some people's expectations, because of what we'd learnt on our other products.
If you compare it to our original performance series, those things... wow.
Atomic: So do you have a personal favourite, one that you use?
Scott Richards: I like the P180 series, with the three-layer side-panel. It's really quiet, and another thing I like about it is, coming from a sales background, that kind of thing is demonstrable - you can show that to people.
When it came out I loved getting a steel-chassis - one of ours - and tapping the case and getting that typical rattle. Then I'd do the same with the P180 - the difference was obvious, and it gave people something they could understand. And it's an attractive case!
And that's just the first bit! Keep an eye out for more from Scott on Antec's new LanBoy case designs - coming soon!
Issue: 137 | June, 2012