Best Buy Back To Competing With Its Partners

Surprises

from the pendulum-swinging... dept

Almost three years ago, we were surprised when Best Buy announced plans to sell their own computers under the VPR Matrix brand, noting that they would be competing with their own partners who probably wouldn’t like that very much. While, amusingly, that post became one of the top Google searches for VPR Matrix for years (just read through a few of the over 120 comments to see what I mean), with many people telling us how great VPR Matrix machines were, in the end, we were right, and Best Buy killed the brand a little over a year later, citing pressure from their partners (mainly HP). So, it’s a bit surprising to see them jump back into the game yet again with new computers (and other consumer electronics products) under the “Insignia” brand. Last time, our other prediction was that it would be difficult for Best Buy to build up the VPR Matrix brand, which turned out to be untrue (they did it by being cheap, cheap, cheap, while also having products that were apparently pretty well built) — so maybe that won’t be a problem this time either. However, the conflict with partners problem still exists, so it will be interesting to see how Best Buy deals with it this time around.