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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
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
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?
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.
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
Quick! What rhymes with Ditty?
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."
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
Granted, it would be much clearer as Windows Media-based, but I believe that's what the summary was alluding to.
SYS 64738
..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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.