Continued:

The obvious question is: why don’t these OEMs get their act together and make their own products. Well, they are doing just that. Case in point being ASUS. ASUS has recently come out with its own notebook computers. MSI has their own brand of notebooks as well, and the main thing is their price points are fairly reasonable.

If the price point is good and the quality is more or less the same, why do I (like hundreds and thousands of others) have an HP notebook? Due to the sheer number of systems HP generates, it has excellent economies of scale, which allow it to give extremely competitive prices for seriously high-end (performance wise) notebooks. Another key factor is HP’s unrelenting post sales support. Regardless of where you go, you are bound to find a HP retailer/dealer who will service your notebook.

To understand this concept better, take a look at Lenovo’s ThinkPads. If you look at the features vis-à-vis the price, I think they aren’t worth the premium, as they are low on performance, and I, along with the majority of you, don’t really care if they are tough enough to fight a war with. And yet, they sell like the next best thing that ever happened to mobile computing. The reason is obviously the unfailing IBM support and the reliability that the company’s brand carries.

However, IBM at least takes the trouble to give you the Access IBM feature as well as an outrageous battery life (read CoolTechZone.com’s X41 review for more details) while HP doesn’t.

So the moral of the story is that as long as you give people support and a name they can trust, they are more than delighted to pay a premium for an "inferior" product. Creating a brand that consumers can recognize and relate to is something OEMs have done remarkably well, and hence they are possibly the best marketers in the computing industry.