Dell: We're no longer a PC company

[Leeky]

Dell says it no longer sees its business as one that manufacturers and sells PCs but rather as an IT solutions company focusing more on the enterprise market. The claim follows the firm’s publishing of its full-year financials, which showed a growth in the enterprise market but struggling computer sales in the consumer sales division.

While launching the company's new enterprise hardware solutions at an event in London, England yesterday, Dell’s president of the enterprise solutions group Brad Anderson announced, "we're no longer a PC company, we're an IT company." He continued, "Dell's changing very quickly. We are dramatically changing the make-up of our business […] It's no longer about shiny boxes, it's about IT solutions [that let companies drive efficiencies]."

The published financials revealed that 30 percent of all of Dell’s sales come from enterprise solutions, with it providing 50 percent of the company’s profits. On the other hand, consumer sales were down 2 percent, according to PC Pro.

Anderson's comments are reminiscent of moves by IBM, which sold its PC business to Lenovo in 2005, and HP, which came close to selling off its personal systems division last summer. Dell won’t be getting out of the PC business completely, however, at least not yet.

Dell believes its earnings results validate the success of their business-focused strategy. "We think our strategy is the right one," Anderson stated, adding that Dell will be making more acquisitions in the near future to further extend the reach of its enterprise IT solutions, on top of recent purchases of Force 10 Networks and Compellent Technologies to boost its products and services.

It will move away from less profitable areas of the business, which include printers and other peripherals, while maintaining a strong focus on products such as the XPS line of computers, notebooks and ultrabooks in addition to the enterprise market.

Last month Dell announced it would release a new consumer tablet  later this year, after quietly discontinuing their Streak 7 tablet from the US market in December. It is currently unclear if the company is continuing these efforts amid the announcement of the change in its business focus.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/47586-dell-were-no-longer-a-pc-company.html

 

[slamscaper]

PC's really are dying, much to my dismay. Once folks can easily connect printers and large monitors to their cell phones (maybe via a docking station), they will no longer buy PC's at all.

 

[TechM633]

Well, hopefully Dell will sell its PC business to someone like Lenovo, who will make the dell computers actually worth looking at again. By far, Dell has the worst PC's on the market right now....with HP being a close second. Oh, they sell an awful lot of them, but as someone who is in the repair business, I can vouch for Dell and HP being at the top of the list for the worst built PC's. Personally I would rather build my own machine, but if I had to buy one, it certainly wouldnt be Dell or HP.

 

[MilwaukeeMike]

slamscaper said:
PC's really are dying, much to my dismay. Once folks can easily connect printers and large monitors to their cell phones (maybe via a docking station), they will no longer buy PC's at all.

There will always be a need for a PC. You can't type a paper or a resume on a phone. However, the casual desktop PC may die. Right now i'm using a laptop in a docking station that allows me to use a monitor, keyboard, and mouse. I can see this model replacing the desktop. Fewer wires, portability, and small laptops are now as cheap as desktop equivalents.

 

[SNGX1275]

MilwaukeeMike - They make things you can dock your tablet into and use a keyboard, also bluetooth keyboards. So you could type a paper on one.

 

[Zilpha]

Yea but until that tablet can run Skyrim, I think we will still want desktop computers.

 

[lawfer]

SNGX1275 said:
MilwaukeeMike - They make things you can dock your tablet into and use a keyboard, also bluetooth keyboards. So you could type a paper on one.

At least until Windows 8 is released, there's no efficient, practical productivity suite that could be considered equivalent to the desktop's offerings.

Even then, however, tablets are not wanna-be desktops. They are tablets. In the future they will have many of the functions of a desktop, but they will always be considered tablets. Blurring the line is not quite the same as erasing it entirely.

 

[Guest]

If they get keyboards and mice to work with phones as well as monitors and printers, there might be no need for PCs unless you need a very powerful machine.
We'll see.

 

[Guest]

PC's are not going to go away. It's just the profit margins are slim due to so much competition on the market right now. PC's will be around for a long time yet. Tablets are tablets and they can not replace a PC. If you can get by in today's business world with just a tablet, then you probably never needed a PC to begin with.

I've tried to find a legitimate business use for my tablets and just can't do it. Now my cell phone with email, calendar, contacts not to mention communication is absolutely critical and it would be very hard to work without it but I could manage (maybe). And my work laptop? Never. I simply could not function without it. My laptop is by far the most important piece of tech I have and I cannot see that changing anytime soon.

 

[amstech]

PC's are dying?
You got to be a first class fool to believe that.

DELL is going to cloud computing and enterprise based business, which is where the future is.
PC's will always be around, they just want a more profitable, solid staple in the industry.

No service tag? No service.

 

[mario]

Why are people talking about connecting phones/tablets with printers!? Printers will die sooner than PCs.

 

[customcarvin]

Those tablet/smartphone GPU's are getting more and more powerful; its only a matter of time before game devs start focusing more of their attention on those devices. Unfortunately, i have to agree with slamscaper's comment. PC's really are dying. In the next 3-5 years i believe we will be able to do EVERYTHING from our smart phones/tablets, that we can do on our PC's --including game on the latest titles, because I believe that's where more and more major developers will focus. Why would the average individual who does random web surfing, plays games casually, or types documents want to spend money on a PC if their portable device can do the same thing with, in their minds, the same experience via a docking station or similar device?

Another example that's happening now: Look at the PC gaming industry now; PC's used to have so many exclusive game titles. Some of those where eventually ported to consoles. Instead, we are now seeing games developed for consoles, then ported to PC. The numbers are in the consoles, unfortunately, and that's where these companies are making money. I think it's because the average gamer doesn't want to drop $700-800 dollars on a mid quality gaming PC. They would rather spend half of that on a console, and not have to mess with optimizing settings, or messing with drivers, or dealing with viruses/malware eating resources etc, etc. (this would be a case, by case scenario, but you get what i'm saying) They don't want to be bothered with such things, and want to insert a disc, or download a file into the machine and play.Take a game like MW3 or even BF3, games that - from what i have read - where developed for PC and consoles in parallel; the PC version sold copies in the hundred thousands, where the consoles sold in the multi-millions... And according to the average gamer "it looks just as good as PC" ...we've all heard that before, right?

These are sad times my friends. Of course there will always be the PC enthusiast niche market, but in the end, these companies will always target the average consumer in order to make the most money. =(

--My humble opinion...

 

[howzz1854]

and they wonder why all PC sales flock to Apple laptops. maybe that'll get them thinking... this is not the 20th century anymore. laptop buyers look for quality and design, that's right, design, not just a rectangular piece of plastic put together with bubble gum and duct tape. on another note, god forbid, i hope the industry don't move away from desktops.... desktop building and modding has been my only means of relieving stress and one of my only hobbies.

 

[9Nails]

Zilpha said:
Yea but until that tablet can run Skyrim, I think we will still want desktop computers.

Good point. I want solid GPU performance as well. I wonder how far away we are from external video cards as a possible solution.

I recognize that the CPU power doesn't make up frame rates quite as well as a good GPU. And I'm needing less and less of my desktop's CPU in order to run programs. I think that smart phone processing power is catching up, it wont ever close the gap to a desktop in performance, but the applications might not need this much power to run.

In the next 10 years, if a doc interface for external GPU and monitor were available to accommodate my cell phone, on-line cloud storage existed for my files, and I had local storage for my applications / cache, I could easily imagine using my phone as a light-weight computing device while I move between docks where I would gain high performance video graphics.

I'm thinking along the lines of the early Motorola Atrix demo's that I've seen which used a dock to improve upon the phones desktop.

 

[Guest]

Everything changes, what was once the latest and greatest is now trash. As mobil (phone, tablet, netbook, etc) computing picks up and gets to a level playing field, those platforms may become the new PC. Of course with cloud computing, it may be you just have a basic web brower device that connects to your virtual machine and now the mobil device only needs to remote to the cloud (Chrome OS). In the future maybe you'll just have a **** Tracy watch that connects to the cloud.

 

[Greg S]

"It will move away from less profitable areas of the business, which include printers and other peripherals, while maintaining a strong focus on products such as the XPS line of computers, notebooks and ultrabooks in addition to the enterprise market."

XPS are way better than the inspiron crap dell has anyway, so I don't see how this is much of a problem. Basically dell is getting rid of their cheap laptops and desktops and moving to the higher end solutions that have dedicated graphics cards and i5's or i7's currently. Their old xps 9100 desktop had the tri-channel memory on an x58 motherboard. There is nothing wrong with keeping the desktops and laptops to the higher end solutions. Why would anyone want a $450 inspiron when an ipad is also $450 during sales? It definitely makes sense and I will be happy when dell does this.

 

[killeriii]

Techm633 said:
Well, hopefully Dell will sell its PC business to someone like Lenovo, who will make the dell computers actually worth looking at again. By far, Dell has the worst PC's on the market right now....with HP being a close second. Oh, they sell an awful lot of them, but as someone who is in the repair business, I can vouch for Dell and HP being at the top of the list for the worst built PC's. Personally I would rather build my own machine, but if I had to buy one, it certainly wouldnt be Dell or HP.

We must see different batches of computers.
My list starts with:
Acer, Asus, and MSI.
I've seen alot of those with problems right out of the box, or within the first year.
I find HP and Dell are making better personal computers now than they ever have.

 

[oldikes]

desktops are inevitably dying in the next 25 years, or at least I imagine. Not that i want it to. I agree with several posts above, its a great hobby.

 

[slamscaper]

mario said:
Why are people talking about connecting phones/tablets with printers!? Printers will die sooner than PCs.

What are you on about? How is someone to print out their resume, tax records, or any other important documents for that matter? To say that printers are useful would be an understatement.

For printers to go the way of the dodo, paper would have go first. I just don't see that happening any time soon.

 

[Guest]

wtf is a **** tracy watch? has the world become too politically correct to even spell out someone's name? it makes me sick to even think about.
on topic, cloud computing may be the wave of the future, but, just an opinion, it's a load of crap. unless you're absolutely certain of who owns the servers the info is stored on, too much security risk involved. as far as the dell's that suck, i work as tech support for a major financial company and most of the advisors use dells. one told me the other day that he chose a dell over a lenovo because of the screen size on the laptop, 12.5" as opposed to 15". when it comes to desktops, the optiplex is hard to beat as far as a general machine, i have two, one runs server 2008 and the other runs suse as a web server.

 

[Guest]

i repair and sell them as well....every computer on the bench is a Dell or a HP. they use cheap parts and cheap labor to put them together. then we get an influx of ****** storming the store fighting for some $399 piece of garbage then complain to us when it breaks down 5 months later. what did you expect?! .... hope you bought the extended warranty! ... what, you didn't? hmm well, hand over another wad of cash then.

 

[spydercanopus]

If they hadn't switched to all proprietary dell parts that have no industry standard, meaning you had to purchase a $180 motherboard when you should be able to buy one for $50, they would have still been strong in PCs.

The only reason they're strong in enterprise is because of government contracts and they don't want to buy turds.

 

[Guest]

This reminds me of the film vs digital debate. For ultimate quality, film still beats digital. But for most photographers, digital is good enough.
So a PC may provide the bigger punch but for most of us in the future, tablets and smart phones will probably be good enough.

 

[learninmypc]

PC's really are dying, much to my dismay. Once folks can easily connect printers and large monitors to their cell phones (maybe via a docking station), they will no longer buy PC's at all.

Gollie, its funny you say that. Check this out monitor