Dell announced disappointing Q1 results this week, posting profits that were down 33 percent from Q1 2011, along with revenues that dipped four percent over the same period. CFO Brian Gladden attributed some of the decline to today’s uncertain economic climate, which has forced many companies and public sector organizations to curtail spending. Such corporate equivocation has apparently taken its toll on Dell, which earlier this year announced that it would be shifting its focus away from the consumer market, and toward enterprise.
The company’s PC revenue fell by six percent overall last quarter, with consumer sales dropping by 12 percent. According to Dell, some of this decline could be explained by supply chain disruptions caused by…
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We told you they were coming, and now they’re here: Dell’s XPS 13 ultrabook received a new set of drivers today that improve the performance of the touchpad. While we’d argue that the single-button Cypress digitizer still isn’t perfect — tap-to-click still has a noticeable delay — two-finger scrolling is now smooth and responsive and palm rejection is greatly improved. We weren’t able to make the cursor jump a line when typing, although it did move a teensy bit. As we reported last week, the new 2.3.6.33 driver does have its quirks, such as making the touchpad take a moment to respond to input when it’s not in use for a while, and for some reason pinch-to-zoom and two-finger rotation gestures are both disabled by default. You can…
In an interview with Reuters, Dell executive Steve Felice says that the company has “a roadmap for tablets that we haven’t announced yet,” and that “we don’t think that this market is closed off in any way.” Dell has already intimated plans to release Windows 8 tablets later this year, including a new enterprise tablet on the day the new Microsoft OS releases. Felice says that “we are very encouraged by the touch capability we are seeing in the beta version of Windows 8,” and that Android also still a potential option for future tablets.
Felice also echoes Dell’s new company line: that it’s now an enterprise company focused on IT solutions rather than a PC company. Dell’s enterprise chief recently said that “it’s no longer about shiny…
We’ve seen plans for a Dell consumer-focused tablet in 2012, but now it looks like the company is looking to jump into Windows 8 with an enterprise tablet “on the exact day” the new OS comes out. In an interview with Bloomberg, CEO Michael Dell said that there was strong demand for a “secure Windows tablet that works with all the Windows applications.” In a separate interview, the head of Dell’s Asia division said that the company would still release tablets and smartphones based on the Android platform, but that it would focus on “leading the market” in Windows 8 tablets.
This latest interview reiterates what Dell’s enterprise group president recently told PC Pro: “we’re no longer a PC company, we’re an IT company.” Instead of consumer…
Acer Aspire S3. Asus Zenbook UX31. Lenovo IdeaPad U300S. Toshiba Portege Z835. HP Folio 13. And now, Dell’s XPS. Since Intel and its OEM partners set out to beat the Apple MacBook Air on price and match its exceptionally thin, superbly solid build, six Windows laptops have risen to the challenge… and while a few have come close, none have quite done the job. The XPS 13 is Dell’s entry into the ultrabook arena, and while it’s got the same basic specs as most of the other thin-and-lights we’ve recently reviewed, it might be the most comfortable ultrabook we’ve ever held. Not only did Dell fit a 13-inch panel into a smaller chassis than any of its competitors, but vast expanses of soft-touch plastic paint make its keyboard deck feel…
Barring a change of heart or a wild, consumer-driven financial upturn, it looks as if Dell is out of the consumer PC business and is turning its Sauron-like eye towards the enterprise – the one place where people upgrade their PCs at least once a year. According to PCPro, Dell will is “dramatically changing” their entire business with a focus away from “shiny boxes” and more focus on barebones server and fleet hardware.
To be fair, the statement could portend far less than we should expect. Dell has been among the walking dead in PC hardware for most of this decade, producing little of interest (the Adamo was their big consumer play and presumably Alienware will remain a consumer-facing company) but there’s still money to be made in selling commodity hardware for a few percentage points over cost. I doubt the outcry will be as vociferous as it was when HP threatened to pull its consumer business, mostly because Dell has no products of any interest to the enthusiast. The anger at HP was more about their destruction of Palm rather than the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to by a handsome, staid PC in a black/grey case.
As MG points out, the only company to truly pull off this move was IBM. They sold their consumer hardware wholesale to a partner who could do their brand justice and they are thriving under the radar, producing interesting research and machines like Watson, the Jeopardy playing super-computer. I doubt Dell could build a super computer, but they can put together a mean RAID array.
We haven’t heard back from Dell yet about what this decision means to the company, but rather than assume all Dell consumer hardware is going away I suspect we’ll see more focus on enterprise desktops and laptops and less of an emphasis on the low-margin, low-cost netbook, entry-level PC, and tablet/convertible lines. This also means a move away from brick and mortar sales, a place where no one is making money. Maybe this really is the post-PC era?
Dell has had trouble in the mobile and tablet space. The company’s CEO, Michael Dell, has continuously bashed Android, and its Streak phone-tablet line was a commercial failure that was eventually abandoned. The once-dominant PC corporation has examined the company’s shortcomings and now understands that consumers value the “ecosystem” of a tablet as much as the hardware, according to Dell chief commercial officer Steve Felice. “We have been taking our time. The general failure of everyone that’s tried to introduce a tablet outside of Apple” said Felice in an interview with Reuters. “You will see us enter this market in a bigger way toward the end of the year. So we are not really deemphasizing it, we are really being BGR: The Three Biggest Letters In Tech
