OEM Industry Leaders Interviewed

jkwdoc writes "In one of the few mass interviews ever conducted, the crew at HardOCP.com talked to seven different OEM presidents and founders to ask them about the PC industry. The names include Michael Dell, Kelt Reeves (Falcon Northwest), Randy Copeland (Velocity Micro), and Albert Wang (ABS/Newegg), among others. The questions ranged from their business principles, to the effect of the enthusiast and gaming markets, to what dual- and quad-core technology means for the next generation of computing. You'll be surprised at some of the answers." Of course, the article has to span nine pages because they have to show their ads over...and over...and over.

Comments

Re:Nice to see a competitive open environment

[Anonymous Coward]

It would make the platform cheaper, but probably not stronger. There's only one brand of hardware that OSX is ever supposed to run on, which surely contributes to its stability / supportability.

Re:Nice to see a competitive open environment

[Daniel_Staal]

Apple tried that, mid-90's.

It didn't help. And it hurt Apple's sales.

(Yes, perhaps the situation has changed, but never mind. Apple only has two unique things at this point: their industrial design, and their GUI. They are competing on both with everyone else. Get over it.)

Supply/pricing

[jense]

It seems to be a universal concern across this panel that the dependency on hardware vendors (and their ever-lowering prices) is choking the ability to sell at a high profit margin, and the future of these companies lies in their value-add or approach to the problem. Dell seems to be leaning to the ever-successful volume model, while smaller niche companies will be focusing on specialty services differentiation. In the end, though, it's likely that many of the smaller companies will either be bought (like Alienware) or stay very small in their respective niche. IMO.