Slashdot Mirror
Dell CEO Tells All
zapatero writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an enjoyable read with new Dell CEO Kevin Rollins. He has quite a critique of the HP acquisition of Compaq: 'They had a great, profitable printer business before. They still have a great, profitable printer business. ... Their profits are 70 to 80 percent from the printer business. So that's the area where the profit pool still lives. It's where it lived before. It's where it still is now. So I just ask, what's changed?'"
Conversely, you cannot say "I want all of the tax breaks and government s ubsidies of a company that is giving Americans jobs" while at the same time cherry-picking your labor pool from the cheapest of third-world labor.
If you want to be a "global company"? Fine. Then relinquish your cushy benefits you get for supporting American interests.
Is that HP now has a MUCH larger enterprise offering, a larger services staff, and a line of decent x86 servers. This means that they can get into a lot more large enterprise support contracts where only IBM really played before. Dell is great at slinging boxes for a cheap price but they can't compete where the real money is, services. I don't know how much it's showing on HP's balance sheet yet but I can guarentee you that the only way HP was going to survive was to transform itself the same way IBM did in the 90's, thanks to Dell and all the Dell wanna-be's there's zero cash to be had in building boxes, so you either have to beat Dell at their own game or find another area where there's money to be made, and services are about the only area I see.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'll tell you EXACTLY what HP got.
.... It's a shame too, I really liked Sun equipment, and *especially* Solaris. But 33mhz PCI buses on your high-end SF25k servers? Give me a break!
3 things:
1) The "legendary" DEC service & support models. Nothing -- and I mean NOTHING, not even IBM -- can compare. Nobody's support is like DEC's. Their support is SO good, it's absurd. I can really consider the dedicated support team I've got as an extension of my admin staff.
2) Two profitable businesses: Alpha/OpenVMS and NonStop (a/k/a Himalaya). As fashionable as it is to bash VMS, guess what, it's still around, and it's still VERY profitable.
VMS shops will continue to use VMS for a long, long time. In fact, as I recall, DEC/Compaq/HP is obligated to continue support through at least 2017. Cool stuff. (Isn't that when the lights go out on Broadway? Ba-dum-bum.)
NonStop is what runs, well, everything. Most SS7 networks are *highly* dependant on Nonstop. Yeah, sure, it's ridiculously expensive -- but it works. If you need 99.999%+ uptime, nothing else provides it --- not even the mainframe.
If you look at this merger through PC eyeglasses, yeah, it probably doesn't make much sense. But then if you look at it with the enterprise market in mind, it makes LOTS of sense.
Now, I'm not wild about the prospect of using the Itanium chips, but I have to say, the idea of running OpenVMS on the same systems with HP-UX, along with Linux, is definitely cool. Even nicer is that HP-UX (which is arcane in a lot of ways) will get some "real" features like TruClustering. Can't wait to see that!
Interesting times are ahead with HP.... I think they're a real powerhouse, and especially now that the integration of both companies is really rolling along, they're going to be a Big Force in the enterprise space.
I think it's going to come down to IBM and HP. Sun's just dropping the ball on SO many fronts lately (Bring back the Blueprints Engineers!!) that it's hard for me to count them as real players in the market right now
I live near a large HP facility (Boise, Idaho) and I've seen first hand the changes at HP. Brilliant engineers are being fired, and what used to be an emphasis on innovation and creativity has been replaced by a lust for short term profit to please the investors. I used to think HP was the most admirable company in tech, and maybe it was, but now... What goes around comes around though, I'm not expecting HP to succeed in the long run.
Vandemar.org
I didn't know compaq makes good printers... I have a Compaq IJ600 and it's a piece of junk that drinks ink.
The Compaq IJ600 is a rebranded Lexmark. It was a model sold prior to the acquisition of Compaq by HP.
Dell's current printers are rebranded Lexmarks. Lexmark inkjet printers are, and have always been, terrible. However, their Optra series laser printers are considerably better.
HP has always manufactured their own printers. With a few exceptions (the Laserjet 5L, for instance, with a vertical paper feed that ceased to work after a while) have always been of the highest quality.
An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
I'm calling the guy out on his hyperbole. It would be corporate suicide to sell printer ink for the price of calf batter, er, bull jizz.
The printer joke regarding HP got old when Dell was young.
Nothing. You still can't make a profit selling PCs if you don't sell as much as DELL. Unless you are Apple.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Executranslator output:
"HP had a great printer business, and especially when we saw Queen Fiorina doing the merger dance, we thought, 'Hey. We're Dell, we rule, dude! We can make printers, kill cHomPaq's profit center, and then TAKE OVER THE WORLD!' But even after their sucky merger, they still make awesome printers, everyone still buys 'em, and we can't sell our printers. I hate her. Damn you, Carly! Oh, and our pothead spokesteen who got arrested for dealing pot, I hate him too."
It's even more fun if you picture him half-drunk at a bar, 10 o'clock shadow, disheveled suit- telling all this to another drunk guy at the bar.
Please help metamoderate.
...is that HP has completely lost sight of its sound roots in the engineering/geek world. HP used to be known as the producer of such geek icons as the HP48 series of calculators, the fantastic old LaserJets (not to be confused with the modern versions) and, of course, the venerable DeskJets. Today, their calculator business is a ghost of its former self, the new calculators are almost uniformly agreed to suck, and their once-vaunted printer business has devolved into the "drug dealer" model of doing business-- hook 'em with cheap printers, then sell them ink at obscene prices. (I remember reading a quote on SlashDot in the recent past saying that ink, ounce for ounce, is worth more than rare old wines now? Or something to that effect...)
Anyhow, HP used to be an engineer's company-- a geek's company. Didn't the Woz used to work there? And he was a geek's geek. Even as recently as my high school education (I'm 25), HP was a touchstone of geek culture.
And now that it's merged with Comcrap, its devolution into yet another mindless "cheap plastic crap computers" business has been completed.
There seem to be only two companies nowadays with solid geek-friendly engineering-- Apple (excepting many of their first-generation products) and IBM (think: ThinkPads... solid engineering and a simple, robust design virtually unchanged in 10 years). HP is now just Compaq wearing a tie. DEC is long gone ("Compaq Tru64 Unix", anyone?), swallowed by the Compaq beast. SGI is going out with a whimper instead of a bang. Sun sold their soul to Redmond and is now producing x86 and x86-64 hardware that are Windows-certified.
And, as usual... no one gives a damn. We're all too damned addicted to ShinyPlasticCrap(TM) to care about the lack of sound engineering.
As far as I'm concerned, Carly Fiorina's head should be on a stake somewhere, the damned sellout. She robbed us all of a good, solid, geeky company in favour of more anticompetitive, mindless, corporate, plastic crap.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
As an ex-HP person who left on happy terms several years ago, I'm continually impressed by what I read from and about Dell's execs. They seem to be doing a lot of the things that HP seems/seemed incapable of doing; establishing new markets (as distinct from new products), managing people upwards as well as downwards, keeping focus on their core products, managing change, excellent marketing, etc.
A lot of that existed in the "old HP" (except the excellent marketing!), and seems to have gone from HP over the past several years. It's remarkable how short a time it took for HP to transition into the company it is today. HP's status as a leading engineering company seems to have all but disappeared now.
Many years ago, I went to HP as I thought it was the best training ground on offer; these days, I'd probably go to Dell for the same thing.
Conversely, you cannot say "I want all of the tax breaks and government s ubsidies of a company that is giving Americans jobs" while at the same time cherry-picking your labor pool from the cheapest of third-world labor. If you want to be a "global company"? Fine. Then relinquish your cushy benefits you get for supporting American interests.
Why don't you put some meat on your argument, demonstrating with actual figures that the tax breaks and "subsidies" (what subsidies?) Dell gets in the US are better than what they can achieve elsewhere.
I suspect the primary reason companies like Dell stay in the US is that they want to be on a US stock exchange. For various historical reasons, the US stock market has been the most attractive for companies since WWII. However, that may be changing now, and companies like Dell may take you at your word.
HP benefits more from the merger than Compaq, for the following reasons:
1. One less commodity x86 company to deal with on the Wintel side.
2. Acquisition of DEC, aka Compaq Alpha, and Tandem, aka NonStop. Instant credibility and long term customer base in the high-end transactional space. For non-enterprise Slashdotters, Tandems are almost as prevalent as MVS (mainframes) in the financial services sector.
3. iPaq and hand held technologies. HP's offerings weren't so hot until they got Compaq's mindshare.
Ironically, HP is massacring it own customer base in the HP-UX space. The Itanium relationship has been a disaster. "Hey, port to Itanium as its our long term unix strategy. Well, yes the processors underperform...and yes, no ISVs have ported over. And, well, no, we'll keep supporting HP-UX as long as its possible.." Of course, HP-UX customers are questioning the future of PA-RISC now in light of Itanium. So basically what's happened is no one is picking up Itanium nor PA-RISC at this point, and the PA-RISC space is slowly declining as people move to the P-Series (IBM) or Sun or linux clusters. Look at the latest sales and install base charts. I figure PA-RISC jumped the shark about 3-4 quarters ago, and its descent is accelerating month-by-month. (Mostly at the expense of IBM P-Series it seems)
I find it amazing that HP can make money some days...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Did you know that corporations pay less than 5% of tax revenue?
Used to be about 50%. In the last half-decade, it's shifted almost entirely onto the shoulders of the individual, because corporations have become experts at paying the least amount of taxes possible. Yay corporations!
Please help metamoderate.
Dell CEO: So what? Did customers benefit? Did employees benefit? Did shareholders benefit?
Funny he should ask that question of HP/Compaq. I could ask the same question of him and Dell's activities over the last two years. Quality has plunged across the line. The Inspiron series is now a joke. I've yet to meet a single customer of those laptops who did not have a problem within the first year (failed hard drive, fried motherboard, you name it). Outsourcing of support has made it impossible to get problems resolved in an efficient/competent manner. Who's benefitting? Not the customers, not the employees, and if they keep this up, people will stop buying Dells and the shareholders don't benefit either.
Obsolescence and just wearing out. You have to upgrade your PCs. You have to do that at some point in time because they just fall apart. They don't last forever.
Glad that he's so honest. Sorry, the ThinkPads I own do NOT just "wear out" within a year -- six years now and my ThinkPad still works great. I wish I can just shake all the companies that are buying Dells and tell them to wake up. This is a company that is deliberately building crappy products that fall apart in six months because their business model is to automatically "wear out" their machines so you can buy again. God, Dell makes my blood boil.
Yeah. They're selling very well. Absolutely. Because you all want them.
Please don't use "you all" as if you really are born around here. You are no more entitled to say this than Kerry's wife is entitled to say she's an "African American."
(Chief information officers) were holding some of these things with duct tape because they have been around for so long.
No. It's because you built them so poorly. Again, my company's Compaqs and IBMs are NOT wearing out. Only Dells. Guess who we are NOT buying from again?
o, I can't comment on that. But I can tell you, categorically, we're not going to buy Sun. There's just no strategic reason to be doing that.
Thank God. I never want Dell anywhere near a company with some real integrity and solid products.
Michael Dell was always taking shots at Apple, now this new guy is ripping HP? It's like some kind of inferiority complex with these guys, I swear.
I guess they just feel a little short in the pants because all Dell does is repackage other people's technology and slap a logo and a low price sticker on it. When everyone else is doing the innovating for you and all you do is shave your prices to run your competitors out of business, the business pretty much runs itself. That must leave a lot of free time to criticize other companies.
The question I'd like to see these fucks answer in an interview is, "Using only your fingers, can you tell us how many people have traded in an iPod for one of your shitty Digital Jukeboxes?"
This interview was especially interesting, and I'm usually one to read a hardware review over a CEO interview any day. Its amazing to see how dells business has grown and spread out over the last few years. I think they're corporate image and branding have had a lot to do with it.
When I think "HP" the first thing that comes to mind is "Printers". When I think "HP PCs" the first thing that comes to mind is "junk". Now when I think of dell I think of a reputable company, I think of laptops, desktops, servers, handhelds, printers. I think of solid machines that work very well, last a long time, and are a plesure to work ok (I love the screwless entry and layout of the Deminsion Desktops). My great experience with dell desktops and servers makes dell a good choice for a pocket pc or printer in my view.
My company primaraly buys dell. We have a Dell NT4 server thats been in the company for 7 years now and its still ticking. Its not as easy to get inside of as the desktop workstations but I've actually never had to open it up to replace anything. We had a different CEO a few years ago that was a Gateway fanboy. A couple of gateway laptops were ordered but have since broken down. The feeling around the office when it comes to hardware is, "just go to dell". I know it seems like the "nobody ever got fired for buying microsoft" thing but the bad experiences with gateway and the solid ones with dell have really impacted our thinking when it comes to hardware
I thought the "Tell Dell" part of the interview was especially interesting. Twice a year dell gives the employees a way to speak their mind about their boss and it directly effects their bonus, and this goes all the way to the top. I think that is a wonderful way to give employees a sense of belonging. It gives lets them know that they have a say in the way the company operates. The company I work for does employee performance reviews twice a year. Its like the same thing dell does but the other way around. Now considering the fact that my company is small in comparison (100-150 employees) I'm not sure something like "tell dell" would work in my company. There are tons of things I could say about how my CIO "doesnt get it" (but then again I'm thinking like an engineer not a manager), but saying them on paper and turning that in to my boss is a completely different story.
Does anyone else hear work for a company that does performance reviews, or boss reviews? I'd like to hear some testimony, and this has really intreged me so I'm wondering if something like this would work in a small company like the one I work for.
Slashdot needs spellcheck. Maybe I should get that firebird spellcheck extension
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Darl McBride, SCO - from Brigham Young University.
Kevin Rollins, Dell - from Brigham Young University.
Coincidence? I think not!
Now - where did I put that tinfoil hat?
1. Carly Got Paid. She wanted to make a few million and shore up her shaky position with the board. She got both wishes.
2. COMPAQ PAY CURVES
Compaq paid their people less, gave them fewer benefits, and shorter vacation. By applying Compaq Pay Curves, most of the people at HP suddenly found themselves at the top of their pay curve. They won't get a raise for decades. On top of that, if you were getting 5 weeks vacation because you had slaved for HP for 15 years, you now only get 4, thanks to the adoption ofthe Compaq HR regs. There was a whole raft of HR changes in HP that saved the company hundreds of millions of dollars on an ongoing basis. So not only did it chop X jillion bucks off their expenses this year, they wouldn't see it coming back the next.
Those left stateside who are not in management and not outsourced, are doing the work of three or four people.
This is NOT a sustainable situation and it is going to come crashing down in fairly short order.
Carly's HP is a disaster. She led Lucent gliding into a death spiral, and she's going to sink HP. And weep all the way to the bank. Plutocratic leeches like her must be stopped.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Except for the ones Canon manufactured and HP assembled, rebranded, and sold.
how to invest, a novice's guide
He said "The bulk of our employees are still in the U.S. "
That is a LIE.
ROUND ROCK, Texas (AP) - Computer maker Dell Inc. has more workers overseas than it does in the United States, reversing the makeup of its work force of just a year ago. Round Rock-based Dell said it was allocating resources where growth has been fastest, including China and Japan.
"We have great opportunities outside the U.S., and as such we have built our employee base in areas that best reflect our strong growth areas," Dell spokesman Bob Kaufman said Tuesday. "Our jobs have grown all over the world, including here in the U.S."
Dell had 46,000 employees as of Jan. 30. About 22,200 of those, or 48.3 percent, were in the United States, while 23,800 people, or 51.7 percent, worked in other countries, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday.
A year ago, 54.2 percent of Dell's workers were in the United States, according to company filings. Dell's work force grew 17.6 percent during 2003.
Dell said overseas job growth in the past year ran the gamut, from sales and manufacturing to call center support.
Last year, Dell stopped routing corporate customers to a technical support call center in Bangalore, India after a flood of complaints. Tech support for Optiplex desktop and Latitude notebook computers are being handled from call centers in Texas, Idaho and Tennessee instead.
Shares of Dell were down 23 cents to $35.56 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market.
FROM: Associated Press ^ | Apr 13, 2004
Dell laptops by and large are shit, but compared to a machine you found on Pricewatch it's likely built like a tank.
PC components are generally cheap enough that you can get away, to a certain degree, with buying crap. Laptops, due to their integrated nature, the extra abuse they take, and the difficulty of obtaining and installing replacement parts are not so forgiving.
You should be spending well over a grand for any sort of decent machine that's new. You probably shouldn't be buying a Dell (of course I know people who swear by them), but don't buy some generic piece of crap either.
Game... blouses.
All the non-HP companies have to do is to actually create a standard for the printing cartridges. A standard which allows backward compatibility. One which gets used by everyone (though HP will no doubt balk at first).
All of a sudden, the cost on cartridges drops significantly. And people will be more inclined to buy printers which adhere to the standard.
I can think of no better way to hit HP at its weakest spot; and provide a lot of value to customers too. HP had better hope that its competitors don't try to pull this off. But being at the mercy of your competition is usually not spmething which is desireable.
You're right, you should choose your battles carefully!
There's a bit of a difference between 1.8 Ghz Celeron notebooks and 1.8 Ghz Pentium M processors.
Dell doesn't offer a 1.8 Ghz laptop with a Celeron processor. What you were looking at is this:
Dell
Go look on Pricewatch:
1.8 Ghz Celeron Notebooks starting at $800.
1.8 Ghz Pentium M Notebooks starting at $1700.
Where are my mod points when I'm forced to defend a company I don't particularly care for against trolls...?
Ibanez
It used to be all my PC using friends recommended Dell. No one does anymore. At the word Dell everyone thinks crap. They are overpriced and underpowered. My friend ordered his Dell and it took 3 seperate attempts to actually get the thing to his house. They lost the computer twice. When he finally got it the cmos battery died within a week and the DVD drive failed. He hasn't gotten it fixed because, unlike Apple, you can't simply send the machine back in. They must come to you (as far as I'm aware), and being a high school student, he isn't home when techs are on duty. Don't get me started on the crap know as the Dell servers we have at work. The RAID array cards on those enjoy failing, and the repair techs don't actually work for Dell and have to do repairs for us we could very well do on our own.
$550 versus $1400 for a 1.8 GHz, 14" LCD, 512 MB RAM laptop? The difference in price looks a little hard to believe. Did you check to see if that's a barebones system on Pricewatch? I clicked on quite a few of the links that were listed under "Windows Installed", and most of them were configurator pages (where you still had to pay extra for Windows). $550 was the base price, and it was *possible* to configure the machine as you listed, but they were not selling the configuration you stated for that price.
;)
Don't get me wrong... I've seen plenty of crapola Dell laptops, but I think you didn't check out the actual deals thoroughly enough. I will say that the ads were definitely misleading. It's okay, you're still an intern.
You're not required to be a US company to be traded on a US Stock exchange.
Telekom Austria, Swisscom, Novartis, UBS and a lot more foreign companies are traded at NYSE.
You do of course have to follow SEC rules if you wish to be traded on an US exchange.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I myself have corporate C, and guess what, it paid no taxes last year! How come? Because its a useless piece of paper with no income.
The interesting number is, what percentage of the aggregate corporate income is taxed, not the number of corporations that are taxed. Most corporations are teeny non-revenue producing shells.
The method and conclusion used here is deceptive.
Although you are right that foreign companies can have a listing on a US exchange, the disclosure and corporate governance requirements for foreign listers are less than for US corporations. This in turn may disqualify some ERISA type accounts from investing in this type of security. So in order to maximise your exposure to a full range of US investors, you need the US registration and listing.
I suspect that this is not the reason that Dell is onshore, though. As a US company, they can get orders from the US government, and their brand would probably be damaged if they changed their domicile or registration to a non-US one.
If that doesn't make you laugh nothing will. Yet another reason to avoid Dell, F'ing MS mouth-pieces.
That would be a valid argument if corporations had the same sort of income ranges as regular people. Unfortunately some few corporations exceed in income all of the wage earners in the country combined. Some have incomes exceeding that of GDP of many a small country. Clearly comparing corporation count to that of regular income earners is pointless.
Hmm... I wonder how much of Dell's revenue is made through U.S. government contracts in one way or another...
Yes, that is a weird kind of restriction. In the long run, the WTO may kill those US regulations.
Many governments all over the world are buying US equipment. If even only foreign governments decided to "buy domestic" for their IT needs, the US IT industry would collapse.
Despite my tendency to vote Republican, I agree on this issue--EITHER you tax corporations fairly or not at all. Personally, I would rather see a flat tax on all corps: 10% should do nicely. Walmart would save money by not having to hire so many accountants to try to figure out how to avoid taxes, and the gov't would get more money.
The real way to lower taxes? Less gov't.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
When he said "The bulk of our employees are still in the U.S.", what he may have been trying to say is "We still employ more people in the U.S. than any other single country." A plurality, not a majority.
Quite shaky ground, I know. But it means he may not have been flat out, intentionally lying... just being very sneaky and misleading.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
It is probably a redundant reply but it can't be stressed enough. What changed is the death of one of the better CUP architectures. The death of the Alpha is one of those great mistakes in the history of computers.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
You have no math. The math is from the GAO. 7.4% of the IRS take is from corporations, while humans make up the difference. Your delusion is based on what informed people call "anecdotal evidence", or "selective statistics". Don't ignore the other facts that don't fit your proposition. Take it from someone with a profitable corporation that pays taxes, not someone with a worthless one that represents nothing but a theoretical construct.
--
make install -not war