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Dell Reflects on 25 Years of PCs
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell, founder of the world's largest computer company, took a few minutes with CNet News.com to reflect on the past 25 years and offer a few personal notes. While Dell certainly has an impressive business history, he still thinks the best is yet to come. From the article: 'Michael Dell started off using PCs to create homework shortcuts, the way many young people at the time discovered the new devices. Few people, including Dell's parents, realized exactly how large the potential was for the personal computer. More than 20 years after he founded PC's Limited, he admits his parents never quite embraced his decision to leave the University of Texas at Austin to start the company that would eventually bear his name and record $56 billion in revenue during its last fiscal year.'"
From the article, Dell says he has their top of the line Dell Precision. Some observations about the default (without customization) configuration and guesses about his usage:
guessing not a single web app is served out of his compouter, from IIS and .NET technology (one of the main reasons
for having PRO)
guessing never ran that processor at greater than 30% usage for more than five minutes at once
guessing never filled that memory, never swapped/paged
(Actually, he mentions he actually has 32G memory in his machine, no change in my guess)
no guesses
guessing less than 10G data
guessing less than 1000 digital pictures, less than 5 personal digital videos, and of the digital photos, less than 5% are tagged and cataloged via some organizing software such as Picasa, or ThumbsPlus.
guessing never burned a disc
guessing never had enough applications running to come close to filling the real estate of the two screens (and probably not even one (2560 x 1600 resolution)).
guessing uses them (it) to watch movies (yawn).
I don't even have an opinion as to the goodness or not about the utilization... don't necessarily care people aren't using more than 5% of their machine -- but it's more a reflection of the effectiveness of the marketing of computers than their necessity and usefulness. Owning a machine like Dell's doesn't suggest a need.
Dell and everyone else is welcome to their over-configured machines, but (and related to today's previous slashdot article) PCs are becoming overconfigured underused status symbols and far less utilitarian. Dell's vision of PCs importance in the future is distorted by the company he must continue to make profitable. The upcoming wave of Vista and the fat machines required to drive Vista are a big yawn to the consuming community.
guessing not a single web app is served out of his compouter, from IIS and .NET technology (one of the main reasons for having PRO)
Actually, I assume the main reason he would choose Pro is because it lets you join domains. Home doesn't have that ability.
But the article is not really about IBM itself, it's about PCs in general. Why not put it down as Hardware or IT? Or even Businesses or Technology?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Actually I work at Dell doing technical support. In fact I'm typing this from work right now while I'm between calls. What happened that made your experience so bad? I've only been here about 2 months but they've been hammering customer satisfaction into us like it was a cure for cancer. I guess they got t3h shitz from other outsource sites where basically working conditions sucked and nobody cared. However i work directly for Dell itself and I'm tellin you, we'll stay on the phone for like 3 hours if that's what it takes. All of my co-workers here are pretty hardcore geeks and techies since the area our site is located in had an economic downturn in the tech industry so the majority of us have programming diploma's and electronic engineering degree's.
This isn't so.
e nsion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Ext
True, it's not the same as full 64-bit support, as any individual process has to jump through hoops to use more than a 32-bit address space. XP Pro can certainly make use of it, though.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Discovering the joy that was a 'plotter', that produced nice smooth output, rather than the pixelated crap that came out of dot matrix printers. Found an HP letter-size plotter used really cheap, and bought it. Started printing out my homework on that, rather than on the dot matrix. The handwriting-style font that was included with Windows 3.0 worked very well for this. Plotting out my homework on notebook paper, with a blue pen, the teacher just thought I had perfect handwriting. :-D (Although, it did take about half an hour to plot out a single page....)
My high school also had early internet access, thanks to a donation of a 'mini-supercomputer' from a local supercomputer company (Sequent,) and dial-up access provided by a local college during my senior year. This computer had a whopping 32 386 processors, (which makes it marginally slower than my current cell phone,) and our connection used a quad-linked 9600 baud (effective ~38kbps) SLIP connection. It even ran X. Too bad the web browser wasn't invented until after I graduated... I had to wait another two years before the internet became 'public', and a friend and I convinced the local ISP to install SLIP software so we could try out this 'Mosaic' thingy... (On OS/2 of course. We wouldn't be caught dead running Windows.)
Then there was when (this same) friend would spend every night dialed up at 14.4kbps to a BBS in Finland so he could download install disks for this 'Linux' thing... One disk a night. Man, he had a big phone bill that month.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Volume sales will, in general, lower the price of a commodity. Assuming that there is demand for the product, lower price will result in greater accessibility and, potentially, faster adoption rates. As there is demand for product, companies hope to innovate to win market share. In this case, Dell's lower prices and [reasonably] consistent quality has led manufacturers to compete with innovative products.
Of course, I may have taken too much cold medicine...
At least if he'd stayed in school he would never have met his loser, dropout friends Bill, Larry and Steve, who are CONSTANTLY in trouble with the law.
Oh, is this why Dell computers all have proprietary cases, motherboards, and power supplies? Dell has not done anything to improve standardization in terms of physical components. Dell has simply continued the tradition set by HP, Compaq, and others of creating and using propretary components whenever possible in order to keep the consumer coming back to them and them only when components fail.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
If you're smart, you can get by on someone else's dime be it family, student loans, scholarships or GI bill money. It's the best time to start a business. In fact, it is the time when a young person can probably be at his or her safest while doing it. They have access to a lot of cheap help and free mentorship.
Of course, management came down heavy on him. "Why is your department only using 15% of their machines capabilities! Every other department has 100% utilization of their resources". The other managers had just filled out 100% in the weekly reports.
That's because you have the good warranty plan. The poor schmucks who get the "home use" Dells like the Dimension with the regular warranty are the ones who get sent to Apu and Pradeep. (No offense intended to Indians, but people who don't speak English shouldn't be doing tech support for Americans!)
-b.
I bombed out of UT Austin about the time Dell was quitting and running his biz. I knew about his company. To me my choices were look him up and get a job there, or get a computer job at a hospital.
I figured, eh the hospital will always have money, and this kid is likely to go through ups and downs and have cash flow issues, I want the security.
Figure out just how I feel about that.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
What the Dells of the world need is to rate their customers technical competence level.
So if they realise you have the smarts, you can be elevated to a similarly rated tech.
Imagine the efficiencies it would create for both sides!
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