My Grandmother always used to joke about neighbors who try to ?keep up with the Joneses?. She was talking about the kind of people who are always trying to one up other people, the kind of people who are followers and not leaders. There are, of course, a lot of people who live like that and are always watching what someone else has instead of appreciating what they, themselves, have. This can be seen in just about any fad or trend. You can see people who genuinely love some new product and buy it for themselves. You can also see the people who do not really know any better and just go and buy the same kinds of things, as though it were a competition.

Look at cars, as an example. For the longest time, people have competed with each other using their vehicle as a status symbol. That kind of activity has influenced car manufacturers to the point that the similarities between one car model and another are almost silly. In my lifetime, I have seen the trend go from ever larger family sedans, then the SUV gained in popularity, and the size of sedans shrunk back to normal, and now we can see the pendulum swinging the other way, with entries like the Prius and Smart car. The same thing can be seen in the computer world with the types of cases being released. For a while, cases got bigger and bigger and even the components seemed to be growing in size as a direct relation to their power. Recently, we have seen the pendulum swing the other way and the popularity of small and even micro cases has skyrocketed. That being the case, I am glad that plenty of options still remain for the PC builder who needs or desires a large, full tower chassis, like the CL-86 HALCONES from CASECOM TECHNOLOGIES.