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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.'"
"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.'"
Did they "embrace" the money?
"...but think about what could have happened if you'd have stayed in school"
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Fun as it is to complain that xyz people have superfast computers that they'll never use, realize this: computers work on an economy of scale. If less people bought high end computers: - Computer technology would not update as fast - High end computers would cost several times more So, the fact that they use these
Even he knows the lowend dimensions and optiplex are crap.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
His skill was in streamlining a business model. AFAIK he hasn't done anything directly to improve computers. He helped lower the cost to consumers. He deserves a lot of business credit, but I'm not sure he deserves any geek cred. He's already been written up in BusinessWeek. I don't think he warrants a /. article.
Developers: We can use your help.
Who did well include Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. I think it's strange how 20-30 years ago, college dropouts could do so well. Now, it's almost expected to have a Bachelor's degree or even a Master's for some occupations.
Funny createSig(Witty remark, Odd reference)
{
return (Funny)remark + (Funny)reference;
}
Why does this slashdot story have the IBM logo?
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
"Ah, we at Dell have sure come a long wa-- BOOM "
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.
My only response is this...we flew to the Moon and back using a computer with 32kb of RAM. Have you *at least* done that with your system?
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Yes, but can Michael Dell's dual Xenon 32GB RAM workstation run Windows Vista?
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.
Two things.
First, people like to overcompensate for things they could never use but for status. Why buy a car that can go 150mph when its illegal and unfeasible to drive it at that speed?
Secondly, computers age quite fast. If you buy a computer, it is reasonable to overcompensate because in 2-3 years an average computer will be out of date and underpowered. The top of the line computer today will be the below average in 5 years but you still can get some life out of it.
Remember 640K ought to be enough for anyone.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Depending on how you slice the pie Hewlett Packard is the largest PC company. When is that the case? Pretty much any other way you look at it.
If I were to guess, he probably hasn't spent more than $100 million of that.
Yeah, I bet he only uses one of them at a time! And he probably doesn't even go over 70mph!
He totally doesn't use any more than 10,000 square feet, I bet!
Point: welcome to the gratuitous world of the absurdly wealthy.
It is through the streamlining of purchasing computers that led to more standardization across components. It also led to innovations in cooling and airflow, integration, and ease of use. They have to find new ways to keep people coming back. This means more features, easier access to the features, and easier use. This just doesn't happen. The market has to be there or be invented.
While Mr. Dell might not have been personally in the design process of every machine I bet he did have some influence over early machines and to this day the ideas he suggest do have weight if not merit. Too many people discount Dell, Gates, and others simply because they don't like the product or just have some inate personality problem - especially against people who did well.
Not everyone can do this, and obviously not as well as he did. Dell is very much his company just like Jobs is Apple. You cannot separate the two and have the same thing. Both could go off and do something else but its their drive and initiative that led their respective companies to success.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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.
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.
Secondly, computers age quite fast. If you buy a computer, it is reasonable to overcompensate because in 2-3 years an average computer will be out of date and underpowered. The top of the line computer today will be the below average in 5 years but you still can get some life out of it.
Actually, it makes more sense to buy a middle of the road system today and upgrade it in 1.5 - 2 years. You probably break even on the money since you avoid the premium for the best hw, but you will have more power than that when you buy you next system. There is an added benefit of actually having 2 systems after 2 years. You may not like the power of the first one, but it will make a good file server, a good PC for your kids, or whatever else you feel like using it for.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
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.
Seriously they're on FIRE!
Well, that isn't quite right. Regular 32-bit processes that aren't aware of PAE can still make use of 3GB *each*. So you could have 10 different regular apps each using 2GB of RAM without paging to disk.
Also, XP should be able to make perfectly good use of that RAM for disk cache, which could provide a substantial benefit to all processes.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Problem is modern computers must produce less thrust than those old ones. My computer just humms, and really dosn't move anywhere, much less to the moon. Now some of those old IBM's I have taken apart, they have 4+ huge 120V fans that move a lot of air.. so I can only guess how much thrust those old pre IBM computers had.. obviously enough to go to the moon.
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.
I'm not really sure I see your point.
First, Mr. Dell did not pay retail for this machine-- in fact in all likelihood the company owns it, not him. I would also say it doesn't look good for the CEO of a computer manufacturer NOT to use the absolute best his company has to offer. It demonstrates success as well as pride. Perhaps your criticism would be valid if we were talking about Paris Hilton or Al Pacino or even your dad having a similar rig so they could email and IM... But we're not.
Finally-- yes, there are a lot of people who have setups that are pure overkill. But then there are many who find a way to push these machines to the limit and still feel they aren't enough. Dell's machine (as well as a brand new Quad Mac Pro) would still take time to render video, for example-- and more so to do complicated effects on HD. A utilitarian machine from five or six years ago would choke on complex video and lag when importing a CD.
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.
Had I been a Billionaire I would've been optimistic about the future too.
Has anyone ever noticed how the PC industry is not like other industries - eg cell phones which are all fragmented and incompatable and the user is mostly locked out from the hardware, or even laptops - try buying a laptop case and building your own at home. Try taking a tire off a chevy and putting it on a ford, or the breaks, or even the engine.
The PC industry is the way it is because IBM just assumed they could patent the interfaces - when they couldn't. When people started to copy them, billions and billions of dollars worth of lawsuits started to fly all over the place. IBM against Compaq, Intel aganst AMD - inspite of great effort and costs, they were given no rights to impose patents over the interface. Maybe this was a failure for IBM and Intel, but it created a nuclear explosion of business, commerce, opportunity, and R&D for the rest of us.
The moral of the story is that patnets do not help R&D and do not help finance R&D, they help lock out competition, and force the industry to fragment and center around a licensing model (which is good for lawyers and bad for engineers) instead of a service model (which is good for engineers, but bad for monopolies).
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!)
While I appricate the fact that it's often easier to understand someone from your own region, America is a big enough place that regional dialects really get in the way of understanding. I would rather get tech support from India than for example Texas, Arkansas, or Mississippi. I remember calling about a software bug and I got told flat out that "may you be fishing 'fer craw-dads and got yer self a june buggie. Put on dem shoes and wack that mole". To this day I have no idea what that means. But I can say THANK GOD for Apu and Pradeep. Never has indian techsupport reccomended I put on shoes, wack moles, nor accuded me of fishing for craw-dads.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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!
46137
Yes. Yes I have.
First, people like to overcompensate for things they could never use but for status. Why buy a car that can go 150mph when its illegal and unfeasible to drive it at that speed?
Illegal? Sure, on public roads. Doesn't stop people from doing it. I've been to 150 MPH plenty of times on the interstate and on long, straight, clear highways. And there are plenty of race courses where you can take your car to stretch its legs, legally.
Furthermore, a car that can do 150 MPH generally has a lot more power than one that struggles to break 100, and it will thus accelerate much faster (at all speeds.) You might never get into a race in your life, but you might could use that extra acceleration when executing a tricky merge into heavy traffic.
In conclusion, don't jump to the conclusion that every time someone buys something that you deem "excessive", that it's for the purpose of status or to show off. You are just into different things than other people are. When asked what a car is good for, you might say "getting from point A to point B". To me, the best part is the trip, not the destination.