[r00fus]

It's like the Walmart-ization of main street - except in the digital realm. Great for cost-cutting consumers today, bad in the long run.

Personally for the product pictured - the Amazon version is gaudy - I don't want to see more AMZN branding on my stuff.

[escherize]

I'm curious how you know what's good for consumers more than they do. Would you mind explaining why it's bad for cost-cutting consumers in the long run?

Seems like amazon is content to run razor thin margins, and if they jack up the price after competitors go out of business, that move would recreate a market for item X and burn some Amazon good will.

I also find the Amazon branding on that laptop stand to be really tacky, though!

[r00fus]

Ostensibly this kind of obvious copying is the sort of thing that design patents are supposed to thwart.

Re: why - It's really basic monopoly theory - squeeze out competition, then raise prices. Are you certain that Amazon will always be content to run razor thin margins? At some point Amazon will have subsumed the buying habits of the consumers long after Rain is dead and buried. Will someone new really come along?

[falcolas]

I have one of these at work (and my colleague one of the name brand articles) - you don't see the branding on either one 99% of the time, because your laptop is covering it.

Ultimately, it is just a laptop stand, and it's a quality one. I'm just surprised that it took Amazon to come up with a lower priced competitor - I've been looking for something that wasn't $50 for a long time. All of its competitors other than Amazon are overpriced, flimsy pieces of plastic.