We see it as an obvious move in retrospect but this goes completely counter to the way most consumer electronics businesses are run then and now. It takes courage because various internal stakeholders, shareholders, and clients demand feature lists and cling to the hope that various markets will explode. Just take a look at the Dell or HP websites and browse for a minute or two.

To prevent having to price match and to make it hard for consumers to compare products, a lot of companies have different models for different retailers - Apple did this before SJ came back.

You still see this with products like mattresses.