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Dell's Marketshare Decline Due to Intel?
timeOday writes "News.com reports that Dell's PC sales are growing more slowly than the overall PC market for the first time on record. Gartner's Charles Smulders blames Dell's decline on their allegiance to Intel, and cites Hewlett Packard's embrace of AMD as a key to their growing sales. Can Dell continue to shun AMD, or is a breakthrough imminent for the #2 chipmaker?"
Why gamers don't take them seriously. Hopefully they'll be content to let Alienware do their thing and won't try and foist Intel on them.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Could it be because Dell sucks and people are sick and tired of calling tech support only to speak with someone they can barely understand from India who claims his name is "Bill".
I believe it has more to do with Dells ailing reputation than it does not sticking to intel. The fact is the *quality* that was once associated with Dell isn't really there, and hasn't been for a long time, and consumers are wising up to this. Plus, there is some good competition out there for dell in the low end computer market. emachines, for example.
Sir, shall we duel at noon? Seriously, my Compaq EVO W6000 dual Xeon workstation is amazing, really. Whether running Ubuntu or XPPro and the rest of the *AMP stack, plus serious heavy duty image editing and video editing, I have been quite impressed with that box.
Why go fast when you can go anywhere? O|||||||O
OR, is it the fact that Dell has alienated their customer base with shoddy products and outsourced call centers (sales, service and support) staffed by people that don't have the tools or skill to do the job?
Dell is useless for servers without opterons. We buy from Sun and HP now.
The thing people forget about bleeding-edge style computer saavy, technocrats is that they have market spill-over value. While it's true that not everyon will be like the most informed geeks in the world, and most will likely think Intels are great, that's what everyone has, let's face it: people who know nothing about computers ask for advice from others.
I've been personally responsible for many system purchases that didn't involve the Intel tax. In all of these cases the computer I recommended worked just as well for the person as it would've with an Intel (if not better), and they saved money. So while there might be only a few geeks that know which processor is more worth your buck, they are the ones making the buying decisions for others in a lot of cases. Dell never accounts for this factor. And in short, it's performance/price ratio stupid... At least offer your customers a choice.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
I blame Dell!
I work on a lot of systems for people and I have worked on several Dells, both laptop and desktop, over the last few months.
One of the biggest problems I have with Dell is all the crapware that ships with Dell machines. From the latest version of Musicmatch (that just didn't work) to Norton Internet Security (blecch! machine seemed 5X faster after it was uninstalled) to the downright spyware/adware that Dell installs to sell (I notice the cartridge on your inkjet is low, want to connect to Dell.com to order more? from the print driver) to all of the 90 day "trial" software that you really don't own but can't completely uninstall. The last 4 Dell systems I worked on, I basically cleaned off and reinstalled a "clean" version of Windows. The machines were faster, more stable and stayed the hell off of the Internet unless I told them to go there.
A second big problem is Dell tech support. The complaints about unintelligible Indian accents and names like Brian are very true, but when you can understand them, they are not very helpful! For instance, one customer they would not even talk to about any problems until he reloaded the system. This trashed all of the software he had loaded, reloaded all of the crapware that I had unloaded (which was probably the point) and had absolutely nothing to do with the problem he called about. When he was finally allowed to ask about his problem, they sold him another 512M of RAM which they insisted would fix the problem (but didn't) and left him with another bill from me to put it all back the way it was. He no longer calls Dell support, he calls me, and he swears it will be a cold day in hell before he buys another Dell.
Whoever blames Dell's problems on supplying Intel-only needs to order a Dell and see what is really happening!
It almost seems like an unnatural progression but it is possible.
Back in the 8088s - 286 days IBM was King of the PCs By the 386-486 Gateway Became king then Pentium Dell took over. It wasn't because of price At the time each respective vender was priced a bit more the the rest. Then after they became king of the mountain the only way they could still compete (More) is by price shaving which lowered its quality so The next guy came in selling a higher quality product at a slightly higher price and the customers were happy with it and by word of mouth they became #1.
I remember people going I am going to get a Gateway because I heard they are reliable for their 486. Then by 1999 I hear people go Next Time I am going to get a Dell because this Gateway is a piece of crap (after having to swap 3 drives and a motherboard) In a year. Now Dells quality is getting more and more shaky and their support is getting more cheap. So who will be the next Dell? Right now the best I am hearing that Apple Computers while may cost a bit more are of better quality and with the Intel Chips you can put windows on it as a fail safe emotional device. But It could also be HP/Compaq turn if they get on the Gun and made better PCs. I originally had AlienWare as the next Dell but Dell just bought them so who knows. But I don't think AMD has anything to do with it, it is about Quality not manufactures.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Most of Dells business is corporate. We are not a particularly large organisation but we spend close to $400K a year with Dell. Our main concerns are that the kit is reliable, cheap, hardware platform is relatively stable and support is good. Dell gives us all these things, the chip and technologies used are way down the list of our concerns.
The likely reason for slowed growth is that PCs are lasting longer. We have 5 year old PCs that are still very usable, step back a few years and the upgrade cycles were faster as the tech moved along. Things have been static for a while now, anything over 800Mhz is good enough for most modern applications and a fair amount of games.
Perhaps the real reason for the slow down is the Vista delay. There is no external push from Microsoft to force people through a refresh to get the latest toys.
Jason.
It really depends on which branch of Dell you are dealing with. Home and Small Business tech support is outsourced to India and isn't very pleasant to use from what I have heard/read. The Corporate and Education branch tech support is all done from the good old USA. I have had plenty of experiences dealing with them, and out of 25-30 times I have called upon them in the last 5 years, only once was the experience less than stellar. 99% of the time I am on hold less than 5 minutes and have never been given the "third degree" about replacement parts - I tell them what failed and how I tested it, they send the part out (or one time a technician to replace a motherboard in a laptop) and I have it the next morning. I'm pretty sure I still have a few bungled hard drives and some memory I was supposed to send back, but never bothered - and never heard a word from Dell bugging me to send them back. These are my experinces with the Corp and Educational branch of Dell, with other branches, YMMV.
"But this one goes to 11!"
I understand that Dell would like you to simply replace the box more often, that's in their own interest. But it's in my own interest not to recommend Dell to people to whom I provide "informal" tech support.
I am not a crackpot.
The parent post is quite correct. The company I work for just got through purchasing a set of new servers so we can scale up an application. I was the one who spec'd the hardware and shopped around for it. I really wanted to go with an AMD setup as the processors are cooler, draw ALOT less power and are a bit more powerful for the number crunching we do. But in the end, none of those things mattered enough to make the difference. The Dell boxes were relatively inexpensive (after we were given a substantial discount), were purchased on a nice business-friendly financing option, came with decent management software, and were redundant enough for us. While I have more then a few gripes about how hot, power hungry and oddly designed the servers are, the fact remains that nobody really comes close to being as business-ready as Dell for the same price ballpark. I briefly looked at IBM but their starting price wasn't even close. They would need a half off sale before things would even be in the ballpark.
According to TFA, the PC market is growing very nicely thank you (13.1% in the last quarter worldwide, 7.4% in the US), and Dell's competitors (particularly HP) are benefiting. But Dell's growth was only 10.2% worldwide, and only 0.2% in the US. TFA goes on to say that for several years Dell has grown substantially faster than the overall market, so this year's change is significant.
Why is everyone trying to explain this with THE cause?
The decline in marketshare is a result of several things:
They don't sell AMD, they outsourced their call centers to india, the competitors is getting more competitive etc..
It's not just one of the above
You are missing the point.
.... growing more slowly than the overall PC market...
"The likely reason for slowed growth is that PCs are lasting longer.".
This is valid point but it affects overall PC market not only one brand. The article states following:
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