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Dell Quietly Leaves MP3 Market
An AD-Esque Sitcom writes "Dell has quietly retired from the portable player market. The Dell DJ Ditty — whose website is nothing more than an error now — was absent from Dell's catalogue, and the company was not offering any follow-up products, instead preferring to stick with PCs, printers, and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions. Dell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players — SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
Back in the day there was a phrase going around, which seemed to have great merit: Stick to your core competency. While not always good advice, for there were a few companies who diversified and prospered, it was often easy to find examples of where companies had utterly done themselves in by getting into product lines and services where they were out of their depth or the product/service really wasn't ever going to produce the return hoped for (during hard times these units are often the first closed because the accountants can readliy point them out as hemorraging cash.) Good for Dell, get out and put your mind on sorting out your battery woes and making better PC's (the past years models are a far cry from the quality of early Dell units.)
Microsoft, still willing to bet billions you have an iPod killer and wish to enter the digital music player market? of course, you love the challenge and it encourages those mean old euro dogs to request Windows with the media junk bundled the EU is currently spanking you for.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Atleast they didnt leave explosively. You gotta give them credit for that much.
I guess Dell couldn't make use of all that Snakes on a Plane tie-in publicity, huh?
What, you didn't notice it? Small wonder, considering the character listening to the Dell MP3 player was known as iPod Girl until the last minute.
"and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions."
Nothing like a bit of flamebait to start some lively discussions!
Do we really need these sorts of comments in the summaries?
I'll probably be modded down for this...
to kill people in fiery MP3-player-related explosions.
My Computer Music Tutorial Videos
What were they expecting with a name like this!
I'd never even HEARD of the "DJ Ditty" until this morning's radio news mentioned that Dell had dropped it.
With PR like that - versus Apple's dancing silhouettes - it's no surprise it never sold.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
IMO their overdiversification is a major reason (but not the only one) for their recent decline, they definitely need to consolidate back to their core buisiness (PCs) and dump all the other crap (Printers, Networking gear, televisions, etc.)
ell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative. Of course they bailed on the market. Microsoft is about to enter it and drop a shitload of cash in an attempt to gain marketshare, just like they did with xbox. The most likely scenario is that they're going to initially cannibalize non-ipod sales.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
iriver for life
Unless the next model I want to buy sucks, of course.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Except for Apple, which uses it's excellent marketing to convince people that they need to wait in lines for hours to pay waaaay too much for their particular brand name, I can't believe that portable MP3 players are going to be cash cows for much longer. They're cheap, basic, simple electronic commodities at this point. Upload MP3's to them, press play, you have music. No big deal. Hell, Verisign just sent me a free one for downloading a 2 page white paper!
The excitement is already dying down.
Actually, they still make the player.
The website is down until they get some replacement batteries for the server.
In the wake of their battery recall and complaints about bad tech support (no surprise there) they are likely cutting their losses and allocating the capital spent on this player to other areas such as better advertising, and (hopefully) better tech support. A smart move on their part as it's too late to make a significant impact on this market now IMHO.
As for going quietly/gently, that is probably the right way to do it as share holders are scrutinizing their Dell stock and wondering whether or not they should be selling it. News that Dell has dropped their MP3 player, while certainly not a tragedy, may indicate either a weakness or a willingness to cut loose products that just aren't taking off. In effect they're playing it safe.
Farewell Dell! One market you can't take over by undercutting on price!
Don't let the door hit you on the ass!
P.S. I know I may be modded troll for this one, but its about time this happened. Maybe all of those "analysts" will stop spewing about "iPod-killers" whenever someone comes out with a cheaper mp3 player. They may be driven by price alone, but consumers aren't always (as we have seen here).
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
iPod works with Windows as well.
"...left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
What happened to Apple? My iPod certainly works with Windows.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." -Plato
"...has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
So, let's do some math here. Apple currently has, according to the most recent reports, about a 75% market share in the portable music player market. If Apple has sold 50+ million iPods to date, that would give us a rough estimate of about 67 million portable music players sold, in total, from all companies who produce said products. 50M iPods, 17M "others."
Last quarter, Apple sold a little over 1M Mac computers, while it sold over 8M iPods. This is not a new trend, either: there are far less Mac owners than there are iPod owners in the world.
So, you're really trying to convince us that out of the 50M iPods that have been sold, there are more people who bought one of the 17M other players that use Windows than there are iPod users who use Windows?!
Did everyone already forget how a big a boon iTunes for Windows was for both Apple and iPod sales?
to treat an MP3 player as just a commodity.
They see their competition as the 4 other electronics makers, not Apple. That's too many competitors at the manufacturing level to have any real margin.
They will just wait for the inevitable shakeout to happen to the other manufacturers and start their own back up again to regain pricing power leverage after the carnage is over.
Apple gets it, however, by making a great product with superior design and clever marketing.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Companies that don't ever diversify don't always do well either. Dell's foray into the MP3 market turned out to be ill conceived, but as the great Homer put it "No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you." Dell were on the bottom and gave up (probably a wise decision) but the Apple iPod is just one of an eventual million other better products. I see no reason why any company with enough money and ingenuity can't beat the iPod into second place, it's just a matter of time.
...to go out with a whimper than a bang, eh?
dude! you're exiting the market!
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
When you look at Dell's strengths, it's always been in mainstream products (PCs, laptops, and servers), significant add-ons to them that get used as revenue boosters (printers, low-end network hardware), and to a lesser extent displays and now TVs. Other branded add-ons like the Axim PDAs and their various MP3 players have never really been a hit, because they're the type of consumer electronics that get bought in person - and Dell doesn't do that. It wouldn't shock me at some point to see Dell drop the PDA line, too.
They've had enough hiccups in recent months that the pressure to execute is probably building. Dell has never been about "cool", or innovation. They've always been a supply chain-oriented company who makes money by taking a proven technology, building it faster and cheaper than everyone else, and taking advantage of every inventory trick in the book to keep the balance sheet clean. That works great for computers, but virtually nobody would ever buy a MP3 player over the web from them based on that alone. And Dell can't do sexy like Apple can. No wonder Michael Dell always sounds so bitter when he talks about Apple. He's about as much of an Anti-Jobs as any tech CEO could possibly be.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Dell also decides to quit making pcs and concedes to Apple.
\
and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions
Seems like Dell is taking all the blame for Sony's problem. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 926
Like it or not, the fact is that some Dell laptops have experienced problems with explosions. Those laptops were literally exploding, and many were close to injuring people. I'm sure you've seen the video clips. And don't suggest that it was a minor problem. Dell went to the effort of recalling the susceptible laptops. That's a VERY expensive undertaking for a "minor" problem.
The summary is merely pointing out a very real issue with certain Dell laptops. When discussing other failed Dell products, it's important to keep such issues in mind. If you can't keep your emotions under control when facing these kinds of real-world issues, perhaps you should take a break from Slashdot.
Granted, it would be much clearer as Windows Media-based, but I believe that's what the summary was alluding to.
SYS 64738
You can still snag one on Dell Outlet (which is, to my knowledge, only available to the US) for cheap. I'm just waiting for them to get even cheaper now that they're discontinued....
..because I thought they left the mp3 market like two years ago
Windoze Media is a loser. Hell, they gave those things and the music away and people did not use them. A friend of mine got one from his apartment complex as a spiff for not moving. The DRM'd music the RIAA tried to push on campuses was a flop even when they gave it away. LSU never got suckered with that one so my buddy never bothered. He used WMP, as much as it sucks, to load it up and enjoyed it the player. Would he have spent $200 for it? Never. When he gets a new computer and WMP no longer works with his little device, the device is going in the trash. Music is about fun. Cool is easy. DRM is not fun and little devices that don't work everywhere are not easy. If Michael Dell can't push it, no one can.
As someone else pointed out, easy is when the device shows up as a mass storage device and plays whatever format you have without transcoding.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
....and use (and recharge) it repeatitily every day. Apart from the crappola Musicmatch software included, my Dell Jukebox has been trouble free, and I've bee happy with it in every regard. So where do I go for my next mp3 player? (if, heaven forbid I ever do need a replacement) Bloodly dell, can't even keep doing someting it was good at.
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
I believe that Apple is "fast following" the Dell trend in recalling exploding laptop batteries. Apple "we don't need no stinking recall" has finally been pressured into recalling their exploding batteries.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
Bloody careless grammer me....breath deeply before post button hiting next time idiot.
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
I'm a Dell representative, and I'd like to say that this statement is not entirely true. We're also in the business of selling monitors, and we'll continue to kill people in fiery laptop-related explosions.
...that should be "you idiot".
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
I'd say that Apple should be in that list of players who make a Windows-based portable audio device. The iPod works on Windows too.
Not to mention "grammer", "breath" and "hiting" should be "grammar", "breathe" and "hitting."
Seriously, I think you got more words wrong in the post to correct your original post. That's gotta be some sort of record.
I see no reason why any company with enough money and ingenuity can't beat the iPod into second place, it's just a matter of time.
The bedevelling problem is that public companies have these annoying stock holders who have little patience waiting for a product line to turn a profit. With Dell in particular, they've got razor-thin margins on EVERYTHING, and a bunch of stockholders screaming for profits to double year-after-year. Dell has far less time than a company like Microsoft where they've got huge margins on the OS and office suites, so they frequently win the 'cut off the air supply' waiting game, even when they don't have this 'ingenuity' thing you speak of.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
You forgot my title line, but I appreciate the help always.
"If you don't have eyes you shouldn't have wings" -- Carl Pilkington
It's not a device. The device is actually pretty simple to make. You can get 31 different new units 4GB or larger from Tigerdirect. No that's the easy part. It's marketing and focus and channel and relationships and service. Do you remember when the first iPods had that battery 'problem' where Apple initially said stuff it go buy another one? They changed their tune pretty damn quick because they wanted loyalty and marketshare. Can you imagine any other mp3 vendor doing that? I can't. Dell left the mp3 space because they never had much commitment to it in the first place. They thought they could make cheap impulse items they didn't have to service or support or worry about. But in fact it's a market in its own right.
..... Dell had an MP3 player? I couldn't tell based on all of the iPods that I see on the subway on a daily basis.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Granted, it would be much clearer as Windows Media-based, but I believe that's what the summary was alluding to.
FWIW, the summary repeatedly referred to the MP3 market. That gives neither Microsoft (.WMA) nor Apple (.AAC) a homefield advantage.
A dell axim with 1/4GB + another 8 GB of storage cards ($400 total, all new) gives you a great mp3 player, wifi Internet, tons of games, Direct3D Mobile and hardware accelerated 3D, bluetooth, a VGA resolution screen, and tons more features.
Who needs another tiny dedcated MP3 player when I can get a nice little 600 MHz computer? My expensive laptop from 1999 didn't even have that good of specifications.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
Strangely iTunes and iPods also work just fine on Windows. Was he attempted to say Windows-centric? Mac-ignoring perhaps? Or did he mean based on PlaysForSure? Microsoft Sponsored? Windows-only? Obviously they aren't all running Win CE.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Looks like another case of an "iPod Killer" being killed by the iPod. I'm expecting Creative to follow in the next 6-12 months given they're going to start making iPod accessories. Seriously, you know a company has lost faith in their player when they start adding value to their competitor's products.
Perhaps they're a bit underfunded after having to replace 4 million+ laptop batteries?
This sig will self destruct in 5 seconds.
They succeeded because they were lean, if want to emulate or continue that success they better continue being lean.
http://sohilsblog.blogspot.com
Who's dumber, the guy who "pays too much" for an iPod whose design, quality, and ease of use give him continuing satisfaction, or the "smart guy" who saves a few bucks on a 3rd party "iPod killer" and goes on to quickly tire of the device's boring and cheap design along with its inefficient and crude interface and controls and buggy synchronization software?
Wow, great piece of editorial comment there! I'm not one to defend cooperate giants here, but Sony is to blame for the shoddy electronics not Dell. Dell at least was the first to issue a recall for the battery issue. Apple uses the same batteries that cause fires and they are just NOW coming out with the a recall. They've known about it for a long time now. HP has about 3 million of the batteries in circulation and who knows how many Sony laptops contain the dodgey batteries. Neither of those companies have even issued a warning about the batteries, nor has Sony owned up to the issue and prefers to let the distributors of their energy storing grenades take the fall.
If you want to flame a company, flame Sony. How exactly does Dell come out looking like the bad guy here? And on an article about MP3 players no less.
Slashdot is getting as bad as Fox news. Congratulations editors.
They wouldn't have any responsibility for testing the oem parts they assemble into a final system, getting it certified, or anything like that.
Didn't think of that, i'm sure. But don't worry, the product liability litigators have.
There's lots of blame to go around here, but the name on the bezel is the one that will pay the lion's share of the settlement ultimately.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c =us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19&category_id=5909&~ck=anav
What's going on here? It's still for sale. Dell's pages disappear often.
>> Can your Axim play music for 16 hours straight?
Yes. I did opt for the bigger battery though, and I've heard that the lower batter can only operate as an mp3 player (the screen backlight off) for around 7 hours.
>> How about 4 hours of video?
No, I only get about 3 1/2 hours on one battery charge. It is long enough to watch two of the many feature-length DVDs I have transcoded and stored on a memory card. They look great, I just don't like that they take over 100MB per hour of footage. I have a CF card filled with all the movies I am interested in re-watching any time soon.
>> Does it have 60 gigs of storage to hold enough music and video to be able to go weeks without listening to the same thing twice?
It has SD and CF card slots. Currently it only has 8 1/2 GB in the device, but I have additional cards I swap when I want to change them.
Besides, I don't feel the need to carry around 60 gigs of music -- I have found that 7GB is more than enough for the music I own.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Apple isn't a player in this market? Hello, they own this market! Perhaps you meant the "crippled WMA market."
Carry on!
Reminder: Apple owns 1/255th of the internet.
Man, listen to that spin! Dell is issuing a recall for their fundamentally broken if not outright dangerous product, but Apple's recall is merely a verification of a possible problem.
I just love the smell of the exploading DJ in the mornin.
I think the article meant "Windows-based player" was interchangable with "crippled WMA player". It's either that, or "crippled AAC player". Lesser of two evils, take your pick. I picked the shiny white one.
Unlike porn, which yada yada rimshot hey-ooh!
Out of DJ, Out of PDA, OK, as long as the keep on with the DMA... I mean, AMD.
jocund is not a word
Just because Dell couldn't make it work for them doesn't mean that mp3 players aren't commodities. Look around. There are a TON of other brands selling mp3 players cheap. Not in ipod form factor either. Think USB flash players.
And they sell too. There's a whole lot more to this world than the US.
The summary says, "Dell... has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
Last I checked, the iPod works on Windows. What you really mean is that Dell has left the Microsoft DRM player market. So your "four big players" is missing a fifth larger one: Apple.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
"Dell [wanted to] Quietly Leave MP3 Market" but then it got a mention on /.
In other news... bag full of cats escape
Like most everyone else, I know the cultural reference for the joke. I think it's funny. It's easy to recognize. But I never watch TV and so have never seen a commercial from the ad campaign. A few minutes on YouTube and Google yield zilch. Anyone know where I can see a copy of an advert from this campaign?
I never knew that Dell made a MP3 player. This is the first I've heard about it.
I guess that's a pretty good summary of how it went over?
Actually, the Dell MP3 player product line was just a rebranding of the Creative product line. If you liked the Dell DJ, then make your next MP3 player a Creative Zen Nomad. They're the same thing with slightly different controls on the case.
...why would anyone pay $79 bucks for a refurb 512MB player, when you can get a *new* 512MB iPod Shuffle for $67 on Amazon?
hoofah.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
"This commercial product is highly successfully, and I bought one, therefore I shall sneer at you!" Somehow this just doesn't mesh with other /. stances ...
;)
Is it because it's a cool kid clique that slashdotters can actually get into?
Can someone name a good "Me Too" brand??
Actually, Dell is leaving the mp3 player market to the big 5. Apple sells more iPods to PC users than all the others.
I was really happy with my gen 1 DJ too until the headphone jack came loose last year. It's a simple soldering job to fix it, but I don't have a good soldering tool right now and when I took it to a computer repair shop they insisted they couldn't do it either. :/ So right now it's just a really small portable hard drive.
Last Christmas I got a replacement: a Creative Zen Touch. The only thing I really miss from the Dell was the scroll wheel control - Dell licensed Creative's file system so it's pretty much identical. You don't even have to use MusicMatch; there's some great third-party software from Red Chair Software which is a nice answer to the bundled software.
I did quite enjoy this blurb however:
If you switched over from a Dell because you ran out of marshmallows, or because you had some marshmallows left over after the last Dell caught fire, and wanted a PC to match it, your luck stinks, go buy an HP
I'm going to have to break out blender and come up with a render of somebody toasting marshmallows over some Sony batteries and/or Dell+Apple laptops.
Gee, that's funny, I had to search for "ditty" on their homepage to find them:
a spx?c=us&l=en&cs=19&sku=DJDTY90
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.
>Farewell Dell! One market you can't take over by undercutting
>on price!
OK, I really don't get it. Why the identification with
Apple and the triumphalism? What do you get out of it?
What would be so awful about somebody else doing
well selling cheaper music players?
...SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative
Isn't much of this speculation and talk of Apple and the iPod missing the main point? It hasn't been released yet but Microsoft has made it clear that they intend to nudge aside all their previous partners with their own entry in the market. It isn't like Dell entered the market not realizing that Apple had this iPod thing going on. But the entry of Microsoft probably was a rather unpleasant surprise.
I think you have to be careful about defining the iPod as a true Windows-based portable music player. For one thing, you need Apple's iTunes software to copy and organize files on an iPod.
In contrast, the players from Sandisk, Samsung, iRiver and Creative Labs work in accordance to the Windows Media Play for Sure specs, and music/podcast files can be copied to the player using Windows Media Player 10 or even Windows Explorer.