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Alienware (46323)

Alienware Corporation is an American computer hardware company and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Dell Computer Corporation. It has a reputation for offering the latest technologies for desktops and laptops that are specialized for video editing, audio editing, and especially gaming. more...

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The company is based in Miami, Florida, and was founded in 1996 by its current CEO, Nelson Gonzalez, and COO, Alex Aguila.

History

According to employees, the Alienware name was chosen because of the founders' fondness for the hit television series The X-Files, hence the theme to their products, with names such as Area 51 and MJ-12. Alienware was originally established to tap a niche in the high performance game market, which back then was not on the radar of the major PC manufacturers such as Dell. Since the high-end game hardware was not widely distributed, the company's founders formed an OEM that sold personal computers with the highest performing hardware and settings according to benchmarks.

Operations

As of FY 2005, Alienware brought in upwards of $170 million USD in annual sales, while minimizing expenses to aid an international expansion initiative launched in 2003 to maintain a presence in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom and Costa Rica. In 2002, Alienware distributed their systems through Best Buy and CompUSA at retail locations. Because of complications with that method of distribution, Alienware decided to better service the customer via direct sales and have since eschewed such an indirect retail presence.

Competitors

Alienware has traditionally competed with companies such as Falcon Northwest, WidowPC, and VoodooPC which is now part of Dell's biggest competitor, Hewlett-Packard.

Acquisition

On March 22, 2006, Dell agreed to purchase Alienware. Alienware will continue to operate under its own brand name. This is noticeable in many regards including the similar looking homepages. This has caused a lot of controversy with gamers. Alienware was a favorite among them while Dell supposedly caters to consumers who are inexperienced computer users. However, Dell's acquisition seems not to have affected Alienware's quality. It is said that Alienware products will come out faster and cost less, by benefit of Dell. It was postulated by some that the Dell acquisition may lead to Alienware ceasing to use CPUs made by AMD; however, this would not be the case as Dell itself has started manufacturing PCs with AMD CPUs.

Stardock promotion

Alienware computers come with Theme Manager oem preinstalled, as AlienGUIse. This has the same features as Theme Manager, but with cut-down versions of software such as Icon Packager and WindowBlinds that cannot be launched separately and cannot apply individual packages. However the advantages are that AlienGUIse is free of charge, and does not show any advertisements. AlienGUIse also can use .suite files from WinCustomize, but once again, with another disadvantage; not being able to use .suite files that use software that does not come with AlienGUIse, such as CursorXP. Alienware has also decided to allow non-Alienware consumers to download AlienGUIse as well, requiring only an e-mail address.