Rise of the Small Brands

gbobeck writes "Yahoo News is running a story looking at smaller brands in the marketplace. The article discusses the increase of numbers of people who are choosing to purchase lesser known brands of electronics. The bottom line is the major electronics makers still dominate the market, but collective presence of lesser-known brands has helped keep prices down while boosting product choices."

Comments

Just shop at the outlets

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The products are perhaps not the cutting edge stuff, but you can rest assured that you're buying a name brand and all the piece of mind that that gets you. Not crap like Akai or Vizio. I'm talking Sorny, Magnetbox, and Panaphonics.

How many are there really?

[Bombula]

I would be more interested to see how many manufacturers there are. A lot of the smaller brands use the same suppliers and assemble to pretty much the same specs as the bigger brands - that goes for everything from consumer electronics to things like PC hardware. It's kind of like a shirt from The Gap vs a shirt from Structure - they're all made in either the same Filipino sweatshop, or the sweatshop next door, and either way they use the same supplies. And that, of course, is where all the 'fakes' come from.

Of course, there is always the occassional flair of inspired creativity. I was in Asia recently and brought back a $5 'PolyStation' for a friend as a gag gift. It was a PS1 shell with about 500 NES roms built in - hilarious.