Dell shares drop a like a rock

http://www.itworld.com/hardware/194691/dell-shares-plummet-lowered-sales-forecast

by jfruh • 15 years ago

19 28 15 years ago

What do you guys think Dell could/should do to get back in the game (besides "shutting it down and giving the money back to the shareholders")?

corin_2• 15 years ago

Possibly biased/influenced view since I do some marketing work for Dell, and in particular for their Alienware brand.

- I feel the biggest issues to address from the point of view of their products are:

- Either stop trying to branch out into novel ideas, or find a way to make them work. Failed attempts such as the Streak don't help them financially, or from a PR point of view. Edit: I guess an extension of this point is that their innovations are big enough that they can fail miserably, but not big enough to be that interesting. Take the Streak as an example, it was a big enough move from what consumers are used to that it flopped miserably, but at the end of the day it wasn't really a new idea, just a new execution - half tablet, half phone, which made it both shitty as a tablet (who wants a tiny screen) and annoying as a phone (hey, look at this huge slab I'm holding to my ear, I carry it in a purse because I don't have giant-sized pockets). If they are going to innovate, find something actually exciting.

- Not enough promotion, from personal experience I see less Dell adverts than I did 5 years ago

- Better customer support. Invest to become the best in the industry in this area, and customer loyalty / word of mouth praise will pay dividends

- Be exciting. The only time I'm aware of Dell products in news is for their new swing-and-a-miss lines, such as the Streak. Release a really expensive, really beautiful laptop once a year (think Sony Z series). Release an unbelievably cheap budget machine that makes headlines. These products don't even need to sell in huge numbers, they just need to get press. If you read an article about how great a company's £3,000 laptop is, there's a good chance you don't want to spend that much, but it makes you think "if this is so awesome, and the press say it is, they probably have a cheaper product that has the same awesomeness-per-dollar-that-it-costs that would suit me". And really, a lot of their products WILL be as good for their price, but they just aren't exciting for journalists to write about.

- Become the number one choice for business users. Fill the slot that was created when IBM sold thinkpad to Levano. Sure, thinkpads are still good, but it's not quite the same. I think there is a very real opportunity for one of the big players to launch a range of business laptops that can become the new thinkpad, the brand that office workers on low salaries use, all the way up to executives who have upgraded to a better spec machine. They used to get by on being the boring choice for businesses, but that doesn't work so well now that they have such big competition. Find a new way to become the defacto business choice. You don't have to be cool by offering sexy designs, or multiple colour options, in the business world you can be cool by letting people show that they mean business. Thinkpads were/are a sign of job status, which made their plain design loved for its own reasons.

Anyway, that's just a few thoughts of the top of my head. Should probably point out that the involvement I have had in marketing Dell products is purely about brand exposure/interest, and purely on a "here's an advertising company that we can spend a bit of money with" basis - nothing to do with company/product strategy or anything like that.

keenerd• 15 years ago

> Fill the slot that was created when IBM sold thinkpad to Levano.

Shame that not many Latitudes have trackpoints these days. You can tell that Dell has been trying to be "almost Thinkpad" for years now with that line. What would they have to add (or ad) to make the jump?

alexgartrell• 15 years ago

Spend a Ton of money on world class industrial designers and sell a rebranded high-end laptop that doesn't suck. I can only imagine that the market for people who want Apple-style hardware (in terms of construction/quality) with Windows baked in is huge.

2muchcoffeeman• 15 years ago

This is like the opinion that Apple should license their OS and allow 3rd party hardware manufacturers to create Mac clones. Or that they should create a low cost Mac to compete with cheap PCs. This is not their strength. What makes you think they will succeed in a new market segment when they are tanking at what they used to be good at?

r00fus2• 15 years ago

Problem with this idea, is that a competitor will essentially reverse-engineer the high-end machine, duplicate it as close as possible and basically do 1/10 the work to get a similar or even better product out the door.

Unlike Apple, Dell doesn't own the OS, so there's no differentiation there. They also don't own any of the internal componentry so no control there either.

Intel and Microsoft have no real incentive or desire to prevent this kind of piggybacking from happening.

Ultimate result: Dell doesn't innovate in design, and goes for cheap, low-margin to compete where it can: price.

WiseWeasel3• 15 years ago

There could still be an opportunity for them to gain some traction in mobile devices, possibly if they could leverage their PC cred and release more customer-centric Android phones and tablets with unlocked firmware, and a focus on early (and sustained) adoption of OS updates and empowerment of users, business IT departments, hobbyists and hackers.

One big disadvantage for Dell is a lack of software design expertise, which limits the depth of their contribution to the computing state-of-the-art. This also makes it very difficult for a company like Dell to differentiate itself from their competitors, and be more than simply an interchangeable part of a commodity computing ecosystem, one in which they no longer have any kind of efficient manufacturing and distribution chain advantage. A further disadvantage is that Dell has traditionally had a lack of relations with retailers and distributors, which worked fine when you were selling a familiar product with incrementally faster specs, but not so much when you need to educate your customers about a new type of product.

Ultimately, Dell's true success (represented by a large growth in stock value) would seem to depend on getting back ahead of the curve to drive large growth in demand, for example with advanced form factors such as head-mounted display technology and wearable computing/NFC. They'll have to do something to bide their time until they can deliver a complete novel mass-market solution of some kind, which will have to be very polished and obviously valuable to consumers if they are to have any kind of lasting advantage over their competitors. This would require the acquisition of some serious software and UX design chops, along with a rethinking of their distribution to feature 3rd party retailers, and a shift to marketing something truly novel.

On second thought, that other alternative you mentioned is starting to look pretty good.

stonemetal• 15 years ago

Turn their reputation around. I wouldn't buy a dell because their reputation for quality isn't that great. Their laptops could use some work in the usability design department, and not in the prettier design department. Figure out something like magsafe. Seriously I realize they have a patent on magnetic connectors, but something like the Xbox pull protectors or something please.

Tichy• 15 years ago

Create quality hardware, fix the web site.

archangel_one• 15 years ago

I spent a little time a while back looking for a new computer with a family member and the things that struck me most that they should do were:

- Simplify their product lines. Vostro, XPS, Inspiron, Latitude, Precision, Alienware... that's enough choice already, let alone all the distinctions within those lines - I count at least 34 laptop options just off browsing the two front pages (see next point...) - there often seem to be extra sub-options later as well. This is confusing and it's far too hard to figure out how two apparently similar laptops really compare to one another.

- Get rid of the ridiculous "home" / "small business" distinction. In practice I can pick either if I want - maybe one is somehow "better" than the other, but it's not obvious which. The "for public sector" and "for large enterprise" aren't options for the majority of customers either.

- Cut down on all the "deals" and "e-value codes" as well. I feel like I'm missing out because I could get some deal if I had the right incantation, but I never actually do.

- Stop underspeccing machines to claim a low initial price. This is ultimately dishonest and results in unsatisfied customers who will blame either Windows or Dell for their machine being slow - and we all know what they'll buy next time to remedy that. Also, there always seems to be some additional thing later on to push the price up - "Dell(R) Recommends Microsoft(R) Windows(tm) XP(C) Professional SP1 Really Good Edition for Business!" - well, okay, but if you recommend it, why did the advertised price not include it?

- The common theme in all the above is that with Dell, I wouldn't feel like I'm getting the best deal. It always feels like there might be some customisation of another model that would be basically the same but cheaper, or the same price but slightly nicer, or maybe there's another way to get to the same page with a better deal. I don't want to idolise them too much, but my current laptop is an Apple and one of the best things about getting it was that I didn't have to worry about any of this crap; it may have cost more than the equivalent Dell (although it probably didn't: see next point) but it felt like I was paying a fair price for it, not haggling with someone else who held all the cards.

- Apple is killing them on things like product design and battery life. This is not really surprising from these two companies, but I'm not even convinced Dell are really cheaper any more, especially around the cheaper Macbook Pros. It is kind of a problem if your competitor can produce a better product for the same price as yours... I guess Dell either need to be significantly cheaper than Apple or their product needs to be more competitive. Maybe the market has moved here a bit; nobody understands the difference between the myriad processor models any more, and to most people it no longer matters anyway, but I'll pay actually quite a lot of money for Apple's aluminium case.

- Try to grow some taste. Nobody wants a hot pink laptop case. Or bright red, either. Stop showing me pictures of them.

- More fundamentally, I think Dell have lost sight of the customer experience as a goal; it feels like it's been sacrificed to MBA, the god of Increased Profitability and Market Segmentation. That seemed to work ten years ago, but I don't think it works for customers any more. Step back and have a serious, honest think about how your customers would see you.

I try to avoid just saying "be more like Apple" because I worry that starts to sound a bit like fanboyism, but I guess a lot of it is coming through above. I don't think you have to clone them to win this game; for that matter, I don't think Dell can actually win any more, but they could still cannibalise a lot of HP's market if they sharpen up a bunch.

eggbrain• 15 years ago

If I were Michael Dell, I'd shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders.

WiseWeasel3• 15 years ago

Or perhaps Dell's management could take this opportunity to do some soul-searching, to figure out where the market for computing is headed, and what unique value they can bring to it.

pstuart• 15 years ago

It's a joke -- Dell had said the same about Apple way back when.

powertower2• 15 years ago

I would imagine 2 things are happening here:

1. Less people are buying PCs and laptops as they are realizing that browsing the web and checking email can be done with tablets and netbooks (and smartphones). A few years ago you got a PC. Now you get an iPad or iPhone.

2. Less companies are buying servers as they are moving to the "cloud". The "cloud" is of course bullshit (no real scalability, piss-poor performance, etc) but the marketing won.

My understanding of Dell is that most of the profits they make are derived from upgrades and from the more expensive systems. All their "deal" PCs and laptops are loss-leaders (break-even at best).

modoc• 15 years ago

A good bit of the "cloud" is run on Dell servers....

powertower2• 15 years ago

Virtualized = many VMs on 1 server (and oversubscribed in many cases) = less servers overall.

iamgoat• 15 years ago

For #1, older computers can still do web, email, and movies just fine. Unless you're a gamer, you have little need to upgrade as often as we used to.

nkassis3• 15 years ago

I remember buying from dell in the 90s when they had decent customer service and made good (for a large OEM) computers.

1. There website was much simpler and not at all like the overload piece of crap site they have now. People use to go on Dells website to configure a computer. That was their advantage, configurability. But now doing that involves one of the worse web site UI I've ever seen. That tab thing to go through options suck. Just bring back the long form. HP does the same thing and it sucks (HP website is the worse website i've ever seen, it's painful to use. But they own the retail store market)

2. They need to get back to making decent computers again. The build quality has gone way down compared to what they used to do. They even managed to make Alienware suck ;p

3. Their customer service is nothing like what it used to be.

They really sold their soul (Where the dell dude?) to save cost at every corner and it shows.

nkassis3• 15 years ago

4. simplify the damn options, there 5 options per model and like 30 different models. It's ridiculous. You just need a few options with customizability.

jarek2• 15 years ago

Spoken like someone who has never needed a specific card or subsystem because that and only that works with mission critical software or hardware they need to run.

ScottWhigham• 15 years ago

I wonder if two significant events are coming together to make this happen:

1) Do consumers/IT workers need to buy entirely new computers today as frequently as they did 10 years ago? I don't think so. I'm running my dev rig on a machine I built in 2008 - quad core Intel Core Duo w/ 8GB RAM on 64-bit Win2k8R2 OS - and it's blazing still today. I'm running VMs, SharePoint, SQL Server all in the background and still it's a great box. Prior to that I was spending $2k every two years probably to keep up.

My wife's PC is the same - it's just a regular box we bought at MicroCenter, I think, in 2009. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD dual core (can't recall). It's super fast. I see no reason to upgrade. She runs Photoshop and MS Office mainly and both are super, super fast.

2) The one thing that made the biggest impact for our computers was to make the OS run on SSDs. Prior to doing that, we were both frustrated.

So combine (a) whether Moore's Law is applicable today, and (b) SSD performance and availability, and it makes me wonder just how much this will impact not only Dell but other companies (HP, etc).

Hell, that makes me wonder: are we spending money on iPads for fun b/c we have extra money that we were going to spend on upgrading computers but now don't have to? Now I'm reaching...

r00fus2• 15 years ago

Combine with the following: 1) Virtualization has made having excess boxes less of a necessity as opposed to even 3 years ago.

2) SaaS and other clouded operations have outsourced IT such that though knowledge workers are still in need, the machines are not.

3) The ongoing recession and latest government austerity trends are forcing the market in general to drop, as large government buyers are buying less.

joshu2• 15 years ago

10% down is not "like a rock."

Can we not editorialize when editing titles?

Dell shares drop a like a rock

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