Profile: HP's Blackbird 002 and the Ideal of the PC
For example, Michael Dell said to me in a conversation that he felt that Apple spent as much on R&D as Dell does, therefore Dell was more profitable. Those were his words. And also, [former CEO] Kevin Rollins at one point said that the iPod was nothing more than a fad. And now he's out of a job. So you kind of wonder what they were thinking. They were more interested in going top-line revenues, and we were interested in doing a story about innovation.
So when I realized that we weren't going to align in early January, I approached [HP CEO] Mark Hurd and said, "Mark, you guys have got to move quicker, because there is some interesting things happening in the industry, I think we could do some amazing things together." Basically it was like two e-mails from Mark Hurd, and he moved a mountain immediately, and things started happening at HP.
In the meantime, Dell essentially had two choices: They could acquire us or they could acquire Alienware, and I was certain they were going to acquire Alienware at that point. And so I told HP that I think that this is going to happen, I wrote about it in my blog before it happened assuming it was going to happen, and lo and behold, I was correct.
So I think I understood going into this business arrangement, Dell's strategy - which was, there was no strategy in the space. They didn't quite get it the way that we got it, right? We saw them [Alienware] get acquired, and we saw the announcement and how they said they were going to remain a separate company, and they're going to compete against each other - which they openly stated, which I found absolutely ridiculous. And I even met a guy from Dell at an Intel show, he met me and said, "Oh, you know, it's nice to meet you...Now that this deal is done, we're running two separate companies," and he tried to play it off as..."Who wins in that case?" And I had no idea what he was talking about. And he said, "The customer." So he thought the customer wins when they're competing against each other, and in our case, we felt that it would make more sense that, if we worked together, to innovate and create innovations that are customer-centric, the customer would really win.
SCOTT FULTON, BetaNews: So you don't see a situation where HP Blackbird finds itself competing with Voodoo?
RAHUL SOOD: No, not at all. In fact, as I said, we're one business unit. We're actually building Blackbird in our Calgary facility, which HP liked so much that we're expanding to handle the volume. We're building new equipment, we have a new downdraft bake booth coming in - a very, very high-end paint booth. We've got really cool machinery in Calgary, cool little laser cutting machines and CMC machines [continuous motion closure], it's kind of like a chop shop. It's really neat, the stuff that we have that we're expanding into here.
No, it's not competing against Voodoo. What it's going to do is push Voodoo to the next level. If you look at some of the innovations inside Blackbird, if you think it's cool, when you see the next generation Voodoo, you're going to freak. It's beyond cool, it's really neat what we're going to do there.
History is replete with design innovations that were obviously groundbreaking but which never took root in the broader market, either because customers couldn't afford them or their manufacturers never believed in them enough to move them in quantity into the mainstream. Sometimes it is the "premium" nature of an otherwise revolutionary product that silences the revolution.
But there is a certain degree of ingenuity at the heart of HP's Blackbird 002 that hasn't been tried for decades in this industry, mostly because manufacturers have come to believe that commodity products like computers no longer need to come gift-wrapped. The medium is the message, someone else's marketing manager explained to me once, misinterpreting Marshall McLuhan, not the thing in which it sits.
So whether or not Blackbird truly succeeds as a product, or makes tooled aluminum chasses into a mainstream feature, it has already succeeded in bringing back to the table the whole question of what a computer should be in the minds of its owners. Must it always be something bound to expire in 18 months, or whenever the next new whiz-bang, heavier-duty, even slower operating system requires a more capable CPU? Or can it be something trusted, appreciated, maybe even coveted, even beyond the point where Moore's Law and the boards of directors who abide by it have already declared it dead?
There's definitely a lot of possibilities. It's kind of a canvas, we can do whatever we want to it.
[All photography courtesy HP Gaming Division]