It's official: compusa is waving the white flag. The company announced today (Microsoft Word document) that they're launching a new sales strategy that will focus on what the company views as its three most loyal types of customers: tech enthusiasts, educated professionals and small to medium businesses. To meet this new strategy, CompUSA will start offering many more business-oriented products, like POS machines and (based on the language of the press release) more bleeding-edge electronics that the tech enthusiast crowd likes to buy. In addition, the company plans close 126 stores (Microsoft Word document) to garner $440 million in cash to help the new strategy effort.

Reading the news about this move, my first thought was that CompUSA will become a larger version of Radio Shack, with presumably a larger selection of products for sale, but the same focused emphasis on certain types of electronics. It's an interesting idea - my biggest complaint about Radio Shack is that it's too small to be really useful - but we'll see how things go.

via CIO Today