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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?"
Dell has long been the leader because they have been able to ship easily configurable PCs quickly and dependably to their customers. Now anyone can do that. They used to offer premium discounts on their PCs. Now anyone can do that.
Dell has always used very marginal hardware in several levels of their lineup. Perhaps this is what has caught up with them. Another company who used to sell well until their reputation caught up with them was Packard Bell. If you keep shipping inferior product, at some point you will get called on it.
Now, does it hurt that they need to keep prices high in order to offer genuine Intel Inside PCs? You bet. But that's just a straw on the camel's back. It was the heavy load that broke the camel in the first place.
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?
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.
Dell has alienated their customer base
Well, now that they've bought Alienware, it's not surprising.