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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.'"
"...but think about what could have happened if you'd have stayed in school"
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Even he knows the lowend dimensions and optiplex are crap.
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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.
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Why does this slashdot story have the IBM logo?
-mrxak
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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).