Michael Dell: We're Not a PC Company Anymore
Dell has shifted its focus to end-to-end IT services, the company's CEO said.
For a long time, we kept hearing "Dude! You're gettin' a Dell!" spewing from TV commercials, and honestly, it was rather catchy despite being a little annoying in the process. Now we don't hear anything of the sort from the once-dominant PC company. Oh that's right: Dell isn't a PC company any longer even though a slight majority of its revenue stems from the PC sector.
CNET reports that Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell reportedly talked about everything but the PC sector during a conference hosted by Fortune on Tuesday. He covered corporate servers, storage, networking, security and IT services. In fact, he publicly admitted that his company has made a concerted shift to end-to-end IT services over the last five years. The days of Dell being a PC-focused company, it seems, are over.
This is the "new Dell," he told conference attendees. It's a company shifting away from the PC sector as the industry supposedly moves into the Post-PC era. A majority of Dell's research and development -- not to mention billions of dollars in acquisitions -- has focused on transforming the company. Dell has also made the transition without the burden of a lot of older legacy businesses, unlike rival Hewlett-Packard.
Still, Dell is "entrenched" in the PC sector nonetheless. Currently it's #4 in PC shipments, averaging 10.7-percent of the market, down from 12.1-percent just a year ago. Dell still plans to compete in the consumer market, taking on Apple both in the PC and tablet sectors. The company is lined up to be one of the first companies to produce a Windows 8 tablet later this year, but don't expect Dell to fight Lenovo or HP to be the top-most PC player.
Dell told the conference attendees that the new company's growth stems from securing devices like iPhones and iPad tablets -- devices which fuel Apple's growth -- and allowing those devices to work with corporate systems. He also said the company was starting a $60 million venture fund devoted to storage.
"It's an enormous opportunity," Dell said. "Storage has been a huge area for us."
He added that one major area of growth has been China. The company has a large presence in mission critical systems, and even around 60-percent of the country's internet runs through its servers. China is the largest market outside the States for the company, yet sales growth is slowing, causing concern for not only Dell, but many other companies as well.
Desktop PC's will not be leaving any time soon, until we come up with a viable replacement and so far, tablets (I have 2, Android and Ipad 2) are just good for here and there.
Desktop PC's will not be leaving any time soon, until we come up with a viable replacement and so far, tablets (I have 2, Android and Ipad 2) are just good for here and there.
Desktops will become servers to operate our houses, keep our data for our laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
I cannot see a Post-PC era...unless the successor to the computer itself comes around.
Always? I doubt that in 200 years people will be using PCs in the ways you describe if they're still using them at all.
i disagree. A nice hologram would work fine. ...in 100 years I doubt anyone will be using a keyboard.
Meh you don't have to advertise when people are dumb enough to buy your product no matter how shitty it may be.
You watch too much scifi channel. Just because t.v producers think that the future is holograms, does not make it true. They have keyboards similar to a hologram already and they are not that good. You don't get the feel of a regular keyboard and it makes mistakes often. They keyboard will stay, but in 100 years will be alot more advanced.
HaaaaahahahahahahahHAHAHAHAHA!!! (c) ASUS, Samsung, Sony, HP, Apple
I don't like the way things are going but I can't deny this is the reality today. most people aren't making intensive PC file-management, docuement-controlling, data-analyzing tasks. They won't feel the inefficiency while working e-mails on outlook from a tablet on a recliner chair.
More importantly, the owners, entrepenuers, managers .... etc who are making the big money and the decisions will almost never be doing any intensive PC task. Or they'll have secretaries or underlings to prepare their stuff. That's grunt work, even if the worker is called an engineer. So the moronic bigwigs will force a new unproductive Windows/Office upgrade on the power-users right on MSFT's schedule. They'll waste money forcing widescreens or tablets onto the workers. The workers will find their tasks more tedious but have no choice but to continue. Right now my office rig is running a recently installed win7 with filesearchEx, FreefileSync, ClasicShell, 7zip ... etc.
while I do plan to live for another 100 years I'm sure something will stop me.
>: )