All of us have either heard or read about the fight between CaseLabs and Thermaltake, when the latter showed lots of new products at this year’s Computex, which were rather similar to models from CaseLabs. The latest developments in the fight between the two companies are rather interesting, as in CaseLabs apologizing to Thermaltake. This actually brings us to the point where we feel the urge to express our thoughts on this subject.

First of all some of our thoughts regarding the industry and how "some" products are "developed". Meanwhile it's public knowledge that the component industry is suffering. The decline in PC sales, which is attributed to the shift to mobile devices makes the life of vendors in this environment tough. As there are apparently different companies, there are also different mentalities and survival strategies. But one of them is rather common. It's actually simply checking what the competition is doing and then basically trying to do the same. Malicious tongues would say vendors are copying each other. But let’s not point fingers at specific companies, let’s just use a word that everybody is abusing in this context: innovation. Actually innovation is used on every single occasion when a "new" product is released, although there is not even one truly innovative feature present on this "new" product. Instead it's the same old story, but in a different color, or with two specific chips instead of one, or even worse, there is just another marketing layer on top of what is essentially the same product, that's already been sold before. The fact that there is no "true" innovation happening and the fact that most manufacturers are not capable of innovating, or have a completely absurd understanding of this word, is one of the huge issues this industry is confronted with. Although every C-level employee (aka manager (aka another word that is being absurdly abused)) should be aware that the route which has been taken in the past didn't lead to growth, they strictly and narrow-mindedly continued on this path. The usual tactics, which originate from this kind for innovation is an overly-competitive market, where vendors are cannibalizing each other. Instead there should be a market where true innovation sparks more innovation. Actually product managers and developers should feel challenged if they see a great product from a competitor and they should ask themselves how it was possible for their competitor to come up with something unique. Instead they turn off their brains and jump the bandwagon.

Back to the CaseLabs vs. Thermaltake story. Compared to CaseLabs Thermaltake is a large company with a yearly turnover that is in the triple digit million range. That makes it clear, that this company does have resources, which can be allocated to different areas. In an ideal world, investing in product development should result in new and unique products, which offer additional or completely new value to customers. But since the hardware industry is anything but an ideal world this is definitely not the case. What's happening instead is that everybody ends up doing the same, which is what leads to so-called market consolidation (in essence: big companies buy small companies, or they drive smaller competitors out of a certain market). This is actually what's happening with the CaseLabs vs. Thermaltake story.

Long story short: in our opinion Thermaltake should have taken some more time (invest more money) to develop unique products. They can surely be similar to already existing products, but at least when you look at their new cases the first thought shouldn't be questions like: Is this a CaseLabs case? They could have altered the design to a point that it actually looks different.
When it comes to CaseLabs reaction: I guess the guys over there in the US were rather angry and they might have wanted to shoot the Thermaltake dude - who took a great lot of inspiration from CL products (maybe a little too much inspiration) - which in the end led to an overreaction. It is my personal opinion that it would have been smarter to settle this in private conversation, not bringing the story to the public. A night or two of sleep to think how to smartly address this issue could have worked miracles. In the end Thermaltake (large company) "develops" products very similar to CaseLabs (small company), which means that the small company appears to have done something great. So now if there is a large company apparently interested in what the small company did, this means a possible business opportunity for the small company.

PS: I did not take any pictures from the Thermaltake booth when I was at this year’s Computex, since I found it utterly disgusting to see an entire product line which looks very, very similar to products from another, smaller manufacturer, who is putting all his enthusiasm and heart into their products.