One company that has made a fortune from this is Belkin, which will sell you anything from bags to cables to routers to iPod accessories to the cheapest of USB devices. In fact, three years ago Belkin even went out and bought a Los Angeles design company: International Design Group (IDG) in an effort to improve the packaging design so that the cheap made-in-Asia products looked even better.
The problem with a company like Belkin is that they are opportunistic traders who, if it thinks a market is set to emerge will go out and find a technology and dress it up as a Belkin product.
And while it pumps out a lot of products, it is not necessarily an expert in any markets it competes in. Thou they are good at cables and power supply.
For example, as routers become more sophisticated and are expected to do a lot more, which one do you buy? You can either go with the likes of Netgear and Linksys, which are networking and wireless specialists or Belkin, which is as much about selling bright orange bags and a mouse that glows in the dark than a router.
Twelve months ago Harris Technology dumped the Belkin router PreN product range because it was expensive and was not seen as coming from a main stream networking company.
