Gadgetory

we're in the electronic section of Walmart if you ever been in one you probably know they sell a lot of Vizio TVs here well you probably don't know is that vizio is an American company it's actually a really small American company it's 400 employees it's about half of them work in the call center with walmart's help they become the number one TV manufacturer united states now that small team is taking the experience and strategy its learned here and it's moving to the PC I you know people look at the pc industry and then go you guys crazy right we have analysts it'll say you're crazy that's this a huge market granted but it's it's packed with large elephants right people companies that have been in the industry for a long time they have twenty thirty percent market share how are you going to seat them they've got teams of 50,000 employees you just can't do that you can't enter amateur stagnant market and hope to capture a lot of market share and you know are the the easy answer to that is that's exactly what the TV industry was eight years ago ah you know for anybody who's thinking of starting a company don't avoid the mature market sometimes those are the easiest ones to go disrupt because everyone's asleep one of the things that's striking about your product is that you're running stock windows right there's very little customization down below there's none of that one of the biggest trends I think over the past three or four years has been really tight coupling of hardware and software even but you're running kind of this very stock this could be windows anywhere the quiet disk do you think about that when you're designing the hardware well I mean good size yeah the choice to actually remove a lot of that yeah cleaning all of that off I think goes hand in hand with the design and the approach that we took the philosophy we we took which is really dude to break it down to its its minimum form of something that's very striking but not going to be cluttered I think windows is a especially devolution that's coming with Windows Windows 8 it's it goes very much hand in hand with with the cleanliness of the design and the impression that you get not only when you see the product close your laptop and you open it up and see windows running on it obviously I readers are incredibly excited about getting a being able to just buy a 10 pc is it tempting though to to take sort of the subsidized to push that price even lower and starts to compete yeah it is it is but you know we thought about it for 30 seconds I mean honestly it's it first it's a differentiator right it does set us apart so it's very easy to market a product that's clean when everything else is you know completely messed up yeah so it's a sad state of affairs it is sad and so you can stand out just by building the you know making the correct decision and the the design of the product we considered the bottom as much as we did the top and going with the philosophy of all details but but minimal breaks minimal surfaces not having the stickers and all the crap that ends up on PCs and laptops I hate opening up a pc and saying stickers all over the place and flashing blinking LEDs and I know each one of those has a purpose and there's a reason behind the choices that were made to put them in there but we countered that by asking a lot you know I be equally proud to leave this on the table like this because I think it's a beautiful design as it's not an embarrassing side you have to flip over I think there's a benefit that vizio has entering this market is we don't have the legacy that that our competitors have you know where the core of this was to to to retain these four pieces the one thing that's really interesting and the entire pcmark to me is track that how did you manage till the trackpad that's good and is it actually good it's good you get to you get to try it later okay I mean we're still actually we're in mass production tomorrow on our laptops and we're still fine-tuning today and tonight on the track pads its a mix of hardware and software first you have to pick the right hardware you've got to pick a sensor from a top vendor it's the shape and the size relative to the keyboard actually matters a lot the physical click mechanism and the substructure that actually holds it so there's a lot of hardware choice not only component but also mechanical on how you build it and then from then on it's software tuning and it's driver tuning and it's I mean we I could go on for six hours and all the volcker details of how to make a good track pad let me ask you this this is it I believe you I'm gonna have to try it and find out but why were you able to do this and no other vendor has ever been able to focus it's it's realizing that track pads have sucked for a really long time and making that something that we wanted to get right so here's the all-in-one a lot kind of going on here toss me out the hinge this whole hinge is mounted to the subframe inside the LCD that the back cover goes over so all of the mechanical heart connection points are happening happening inside here are all desktops dropping not all months all ones are growing all ions are growing absolutely so all ones are growing I think the compiler generative laptops yes absolutely it's the fastest growing form factor in pcs by heart so and I think that's you know people are getting enough horsepower of an all-in-one it's it's it's easy it's beautiful I don't have a big you know four liter box do you think that's because people have tablets uh I don't know I don't know if that's because I mean that that goes right back to the center of digital hobbies I've got this consumption device and walking over with it I've got a pearl made my stuff somewhere yeah i think it's i don't know i ask a question i don't know exactly why it's growing and the interest in its growing I think you know very very high and I think this will be one of the top performing all in ones yeah in the world when we launched it how are you gonna sell these guys are you going to walmart yep same thing so yeah you know if you're watching what Walmart's doing go into a top walmart recently and you will see them transforming their electronics section into something that honestly competes with best body and they're ratcheting up what they're bringing in there ratcheting up the quality of the retail experience there and so that matches us perfect most pcs are still sold through kind of traditional retail and you know we hope to bring these this premium product to the mass market right and that's what we do we don't you know it's very easy for us to actually sell this a two thousand dollars and we define that's not interesting to us what what we like to do is create great technology and sell boatloads of it to every every American every consumer that wants it being a being a small American company actually has its advantages and disadvantages right and we tend to focus on the advantages and actually leverage them as best we can disadvantage is we only have so many resources and we can only do so many things what that makes us do though it makes us focus it makes us focus on the products that we think are right and get those done and get those done well because i'm not going to build you know a hundred different products and different categories we just can't do that we have to get into a category win it and move on to the next one and be very deliberate about what we do which is so that's actually i think that's actually the good side of having to have focus and being small but i think the other advantages were we're extremely fast we can move extraordinarily quickly we can think about a product and actually have it at one of our retailers within six months and I mean you know conception design electrical engineering software engineering EVT pvt full design verification key way shipping and actually have a sit on a retail shelf within six months no other company can do that in the consumer electronics space there's kind of a lot made in my part of tech industry that kind of a new company where you can't be a hardware startup but you can't just start making a hardware Hospital you guys seem to be defying that trend yeah what would you say to somebody who wants to do a hardware so it if that's where your passion is and that's where you think you can make a difference do it there's no there's no reason I you know again we entered an extremely mature industry 10 years ago TVs it was stagnant dead we came in and and and really disrupted it in a lot of ways hardware it's actually a physical instantiation of software that's kind of what's happening nowadays right i mean we're shipping a tablet and great there is a tablet it's great hardware and everything but that's really a physical instantiation of android right so you can't be couple the two totally and if you if you're a product guy if you're somebody who just loves products and you think you can innovate hardware it do it there's no reason you can't do it especially now the way that technology is done the way that you can leverage parking companies in the amount of talent that's out there there's no reason not to do it