Crazy, sexy, cool – IT’s image redevelopment

In many areas of business, society and life in general, there are fashions, fads and images by which we associate personalities, social images and trends. Through this, evaluations are often done to define areas of interest such as the demography of those who purchase a company’s product, the impression given by the product and the influence of a product. This product can be a single piece of hardware, a complete system integration for a business or simply the perception received by the general consumer public.

It’s becoming increasingly important to not only make the product or service attractive to the end-user in terms of functionality, availability and pricing but now there’s a push within the industry to assure aesthetic appeal as well. By making IT and everything within it appeal as sexy and/or cool, there is yet another opening to a market otherwise not focused on in the past.

When individuals think of computer electronics and sexy, most will mention Apple. While it has seemingly mastered style and appearance, Apple is not the soul parent of IT fashion. Perhaps the most hardcore push of fashion, lifestyle and a general cool image within IT can certainly be observed from the enthusiast sector. By doing many
things weird, wonderful and different, the enthusiast sector pushes the boundaries and the lengths at which these boundaries can be pushed.

The gaming market of the enthusiast sector is one such example, showing an ever increasing market growth and appeal to a broader market year by year. This isn’t just the games themselves but the playing and players of the games. In Korea, we’ve been seeing for some years now, young ‘cyber athletes’ competing in large gaming tournaments and earning in excess of $100,000 a year. This development is continuing to gain momentum and strength in the Australian market with professional gamers starting to earn upwards to and in excess of $35,000 a year. Still a far cry from the Korean professional gamers, this fact however shows the ever growing potential within the Australian enthusiast scene.

These cyber athletes carry with them an inherent level of ‘cool’. The concept of playing games for a living is appealing to many to say the least and draws to it a young audience who idolise these virtual heroes.

Also bursting from the enthusiast hardcore to the IT mainstream is the concept and associated halo effect from overclocking, particularly extreme overclocking. With the apparent acceptance of overclocking by vendors such as Intel, NVIDIA and Dell, the market is now prepared to not only encourage but to take advantage of overclocking.
This introduction of support for a concept that was blacklisted by many vendors in the past has yet again opened up avenues for growth, expansion and most obvious over the past two to four quarters is the commercialisation and push to the mainstream market of overclocking.

This push has influenced the consumer market in a way that at least most IT-minded individuals now know the general concept of overclocking. Not only this, but with backing from large companies such as Gigabyte and Asus, overclockers are now able to develop their own league of competitive overclocking competitions all over the world, of which is most prevalent in the Australasian region.

These competitions are seeing individuals as well as teams of overclockers flown in from overseas to compete in competitions as well as doing demonstrations and exhibitions. A good example is the string of overclocking competitions hosted by Gigabyte and Asus throughout the Australasian region over the past six months. Adding to this, an unofficial overclocking showdown between Team OCX and Team Xtreme Systems will occur at CES in Las Vegas in January 2008 as they demonstrate overclocking on different pieces of hardware as exhibitions of the vendors supporting them.

Locally, the push for cool and sexy within IT has certainly been headed by Altech. Through support for the amateur and professional Australian gaming scene as well as Australian overclockers, their recent efforts to mix IT know-how and sex appeal has been met with open arms by many who attend the shows and events that the company appears at. With a mixture of overclocking knowledge, gamer support, beautiful booth babes and exotic cars, the company has been taking the glasses off the IT stereotype and replacing it with an image of power and success.

It’s time to redesign, redevelop and most importantly, re-educate the appearances, understand and social image of IT and the associated factions within it. Be beautiful, be brave and be outrageous – it’s our time to shine, people!