Tough times for displays
At CES earlier in the year display vendor Viewsonic announced it had decided to become a late entrant to the netbook and all-in-one PC market.
This is apparently taking the form of the VieBook netbook - a 10.2 inch Atom PC with a cost of $429 - an 18.5 inch Atom based nettop called the VPC100 ViePC costing $549, and the $399 ViePC, which is an Atom based attachable PC seemingly along the lines of MSI's Windbox.
All of these products were expected to hit the market around now and, while we struggled to be optimistic about Viewsonic's chances of succeeding when arriving late to a congested, low margin market, we thought we'd see if an when we might expect to see them in the UK.
Imagine our surprise, therefore, when it emerged that not only was Viewsonic's UK PR contact no longer working for the company, but upon phoning its UK office it turns out the European VP and sales director Mel Taylor had also left the company at the end of last year. For some reason he's still listed as being in place on the Viewsonic website.
When we asked who we could speak to regarding marketing we were told it was all being run out of Taiwan now and it was only when we enquired about sales, and after we were initially told that there were no sales people available, that we were put through to European sales coordinator Karen Hepher.
