Dell CEO: Very few will survive the PC bloodbath Texan Mick, founder and CEO at Dell – the PC company which took his surname – reckons in five to seven years it will be game over for most of the stragglers currently selling computers. The three biggest shifters of such tin – Lenovo, HP and Dell – already account for more than 50 per cent of shipments globally, but that will …
“Financially it is tough,” he said, “there is nobody arguing that we will not be there in the future. The market trends toward commoditisation ... plays totally in our favour. We know how to play the low-cts environment."
Yeah, we've seen how, but stuffing malware in Lenovo-installed OSes (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/19/superfish_lenovo_spyware/) and even in bloody motherboards (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/12/lenovo_firmware_nasty/) !
Of course, getting some money from cyber-crims to enhance margin ...
Oh, not this shit AGAIN.
Yep, they did it. Nope, they didn't quite understand what they were doing. They took money to make a low-margin product cheaper. As soon as they found out, they stopped. It was only ever on the cheapest nastiest shit they sell, never on the ex-IBM product lines. And no, I don't work for Lenovo but I do own a ThinkPad and it's basically the best laptop I've ever had.
This was a catastrophe for Lenovo. No sane board would have approved it with full knowledge. It cost them far more than they made. Think they're ever going to do it again? I think they're the absolute last company that'll risk being burned that way another time.
I also think Michael Dell is full of shit and Asus stand a far better chance of being one of the Big Three than Dell do. Although both are still better than HP, which should just roll over and die already.
Yes, again!
It is obvious to the rest of the world that Lenovo knew what they were doing and that they are going to do it again as soon as people like you will help us all calm down. They did not stopped when they found out, they stopped when they were caught.
No sane board would have approved it, my leg!
"Yep, they did it. Nope, they didn't quite understand what they were doing."
Really ? They developped a program aimed at detecting a Windows agent, overwrite it at boot time, all of this embedded in the MB memory, without knowing what they were doing ? It costed them quite some effort, so be sure they knew what they were doing, along with all the engineering mgmt line.
"They took money to make a low-margin product cheaper."
Yeah, in other words, they screwed their customer by selling their laptop to someone else to make for a better price. You seem to find this OK, I don't.
"It was only ever on the cheapest nastiest shit they sell, never on the ex-IBM product lines."
Doesn't matter. People paid for it anyway. Again, you seem to find it OK, I don't.
"This was a catastrophe for Lenovo. No sane board would have approved it with full knowledge. It cost them far more than they made. Think they're ever going to do it again?"
This was a very minor incident for Lenovo. Which of your neighbours or mine heard of it ? They were just cought and backtracked in emergency. Joe User will still find those Lenovo laptops very attractive at the local shop. Of course, they'll do it again, but will try to be more cautious.
If I were a security researcher, my christmas gift would be the first entry level Lenovo laptop, 2016 line.
Dell's Euro head ad Michael Dell are attempting to put a good spin on their prospect for survival in the Post-PC technology landscape of tomorrow - by the current but getting old definition of PC (Persnal Computer) in sales, with no regard for how a PC will be defined - whether Tablets, Chromebook type notebooks will be the new definition of PC in future or not.
Since Dell, Microsoft and HP to name just three dinosaurs have very little presence in the Tablet, burgeoning Chromebook notebook category or PC capability Smartphone markets, I suggest that Dell especially, realize and acknowledge that the Apple and Android/Linux mobile ecosystems have eaten their lunch, with a significant proportion of the PC usage moving to mobile devices. IBM's and Apple's cooperative investment of 3 plus $billion in Enterprise end user coputing that is in very high demand should be an indicator.
The almost permanent tethering of Dell to Microsoft Windows only will continue a failed policy and results. Maybe Microsoft's injection of 4 $billion into privatized Dell was not such a great benefit after all.
Regarding the Microsoft Dell investment, this is of a piece with their enterprise strategy. Neither Lenovo nor HP's enterprise operations are likely to wander away from the fold. Dell doesn't have the same constraints (stockmarket, media, "focus"). Interesting play but really hammering a nail through one's dance partner's foot.
Well, Dell, you certainly will be last on my list of proposed vendors since I had to deal with the twin idiocies of "Dell Lock-In Electronics" and "Locked-in Part Obsolescence" with my aging but still giving 100% laptop's power supply. If not for this I'd be a big Dell singer-upper.
I'll buy elsewhere for my next computer, which will run Linux because the arse-faced abortion of Windows 10 is a straw too much for this camel's back.
With any luck the said computer will feature an ARM-derived architecture too, so I won't have to worry about hardware lockdown elsewhere in the machine.
And you, dear Dell, have only yourselves to blame.
You're speaking of ARM like in the first generations of Microsoft Surface or the multitude of hardware locked tablets from virtually every hardware manufacturer ?
My Asus Transformer 101 is gathering dust since the manufacturer quit providing any update and looking on Google on how to unlock it did not show much in terms of reliable information (yeah, you could do it but beware there are risks and so on).
Up to Windows 8 the PC was the only relatively unlocked platform but now Windows 10 tells us this is definitely gone.
Dell Lock-In Electronics
Aren't those a joy? I've encountered a failed power supply that, when replaced with a normal PSU, caused the machine to interpret "off" as meaning "turn the fan on, then off, repeat forever". Luckily the machine was just a whipping boy for whatever random job required a box thrown at it temporarily, so it didn't matter.
Then there was the laptop power adapter with the three connections; ground, positive and the connection-to-a-chip-that-identifies-the-power-adapter-as-dell-pineapple-up-the-customers-ass pin. If the laptop couldn't identify the chip properly then the bios would down-clock the CPU by 50%. A normal replacement adapter ran something like $60. The magical Dell adapter was $170 and would have taken a month to arrive. Luckily there was a way to downgrade the bios to prevent it from crippling the laptop on boot.
And let's not forget the conga line of pants-on-head retarded cases that Dell has excreted over the years. Those clam cases were great, opening them felt like pulling the guts out of a fish, opening them all the way caused the IO cables to be ripped out at a 45 degree angle.
Capacitors were another thing that were done The Dell Way. Lots of people got burned in the mid-zeros by crap capacitors, but only Dell (as far as I know) sent out replacement boards they knew would fail almost immediately. Nothing like sending out a box full of motherboards with barfing caps every week only to open a fresh box full of replacement boards time bombs.
…who recommended that Apple should be broken up and the money given back to the shareholders? Seriously, dude, this prediction malarkey is tough - and you suck at it.
The other thing you suck at is making decent computers. I ought to know - I've had three of the feckers (a Dell Dimension 486 (which I was given), a Dell XPS (which I bought because I didn't learn after the Dimension debacle), and a notebook (from work, which I still have - but which I relegated to a drawer after a week and didn't use again because it was so vile.))
I think that there will always be, at the very least, a market for carefully designed, well thought out and beautifully constructed (and often bespoke) PCs for users who demand quality hardware but don't, for whatever reason, want a Mac. This is the raison d'être of many of the small PC manufacturers- and I'll wager that some of them will still be around when Dell, at long last, has been broken up and the money returned to its investors.
"I think that there will always be, at the very least, a market for carefully designed, well thought out and beautifully constructed (and often bespoke) PCs for users who demand quality hardware but don't, for whatever reason, want a Mac."
Maybe not bespoke like Rolls-Royce style bespoke, but certainly firmly entrenched in the "not crap" camp. This is what Lenovo _was_ doing with the ex-IBM ThinkPads. Last generation, however, they started removing useful features and trying to make the thing look like a grayish-black MacBook Pro. They're only now reversing some of this with the new generation T and W series.
ThinkPads are a perfect example of this -- boring, non-sexy business notebooks that a certain set of professionals gravitate towards. They get their margin on these boxes -- they're still very expensive compared to a similarly-specced consumer garbage notebook.
What I think will happen with the PC market is this -- most consumers who used to buy the garbage $300 HP laptop from Best Buy are happy with their phones and iPads now. That whole range of the market is going to be gone, since PCs are increasingly going to be a niche purchase. As he people who need PCs shrink, they're going to be a more finicky bunch overall, and that is where the higher margins come through.
it is better to be the big guy than the little guy, because it is expensive and you need to have a better balance sheet
Officially Eric Cador, Lenovo president for Europe, is a visionless, futile wanker. How completely inspiring that they think there'll be no "little guys" distrupting things in the future.
This is why no one ever has to worry about a monopoly in a truly free market: the big guys get complacent and the little guys outmaneuver them. Opportunity knocking...
"This is why no one ever has to worry about a monopoly in a truly free market: the big guys get complacent and the little guys outmaneuver them. Opportunity knocking..."
This assumes (1) the upstart can get around things like barriers of entry and big guys that may be complacent but react very quickly to a challenge, and (2) the market is still there and not, say, saturated.
More recent experiences with Dell have made me too go elsewhere. I expect corporates will stick with the big boys but smaller users are better served by fleet-of-foot smaller companies. The big boys currently have warehouses full of unsold old models. If I don't want "last year's model" but newest technology or something bespoke, the smaller guys win. On the same basis they can build an inexpensive box by buying last year's tech components at prices that reflect that it's been superceded. The issue for them is that the home user and SME markets are now much smaller with mobile devices nibbling away.
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