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HP Regains Throne as Top PC Maker
Nick writes "HP is once again the leading PC manufacturer." From the article: "HP has snatched the PC crown from Dell's barely coherent clutches. It has taken HP close to three years to once again lead the market in worldwide PC sales. Under CEO Carly Fiorina and post Compaq, the company largely gave up on the tit-for-tat struggle with Dell for the PC top spot that had been so important to it over the years. Now it has reclaimed the #1 slot during the third quarter on the back of Dell's self-destruction. Overall, worldwide PC shipments hit 59.1m units in the third quarter - a 7 per cent rise from the same period last year, according to new data from Gartner. The US PC market, however, dipped 2 per cent, marking its first fall since mid-2002. Dell is particularly exposed to the US PC market, and it showed." Update: 10/20 16:37 GMT by Z : Switched link to a more current story.
Now that everyone knows that HP-hired goons will go through your garbage, sit outside your house, and take pictures of you & your family...it seems everybody thinks HP is great!
I look forward to Sony, Microsoft, and SCO trying this next...
Published: January 16, 2003, 4:49 PM PST Zonk is one of those "special" article submitters, I take it?
It's good to see HP getting results from the vast improvement in PC quality, pricing, and service. My company used to solely buy Dell's, but lately have become frustrated by the 'here today gone tomorrow' pricing. It's annoying for a small business purchasing manager to go into Dell's Home PC section and find the same PC as the Small Business section for $100 less one day, and $100 more the next. Come on Dell, stop playing games with us.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Am using a Dell 233Mz w/ 64Mb RAM, 4 Gb SCSI disk running NT 4.0, service pack 6a. Has HP got anything that can beat that? I hate to get stuck on the upgrade treadmill, as you might notice...
Firefox, Notepad, & Popcorn are all I mostly use, anyhow.
Wow...Zonk, which drugs are you taking, and where did you get them?
Four years ago, I purchased a Dell laptop for my son when he went off to college. It lasted all of a year before the hard drive died. After quite a bit of trouble with customer service reading scripts in Indiglish we finally got an RMA. The machine worked for about two weeks after it was returned and then developed some unrelated problem. Rather than waste another 4 hours on un-intelligible tech support, I bought my son another computer from a different manufacturer. It's worked flawlessly for the past 3 years.
Judging from what I read on the net while I was researching my son's second problem, I don't think my experience with poor quality product and poor quality tech support from Dell is unique.
There's a limit to cost cutting - go too far and you destroy the reason people initially bought from you. In my case, it'll be a long time before I ever buy another Dell. In the past 4 years, that's 3 computers Dell hasn't sold me.
With success like this, I think she can look forward to a long and exciting career!
Badass Resumes
You guys laugh now, but I'll bet you'll be interested when they start posting articles from the future.
Dark Reflection
...instead of business news?
So, HP is now the top PC vendor.
And this means what? Vista will run in some new, exciting way different from the way it runs on Dells? Interesting new _kinds_ of peripherals will come to market first on HP boxes, the way the Sony 3.5" diskette did?
Or does it just mean (yawn) that on the right day with the wind behind it, some HP models may offer incrementally more RAM or an incrementally faster processor than the equivalent Dell, especially for corporate purchasing agents purchasing them in quantities of a thousand?
How long has it been since HP tried anything like NewWave?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
FTA: Hewlett-Packard regained its position as the world's largest PC maker in the fourth quarter, while the industry overall saw shipments increase in the quarter and in 2002 as a whole.
This isn't to say that HP hasn't regained the top spot, but this article actually is out of date. There is no typo. It's the wrong article.
Badass Resumes
Just for the record, never buy a first generation apple. I will wait till they do a complete line update on the macbooks before buying one. Every new design has bugs. Even from Apple. But the story is always revision a models tend to need more TLC(with /without a hammer) than later versions.
My 12" powerbook G4 acted up once. I finially figured out that several of the fonts had gotten corrupted on the HD, ncreasing their size by an order of magnitude.(yea 3 gigs of fonts when it's supposed to be less than 200 megs) and it was doing random things to the OS. I was upgrading to 10.4 at the time so I wasn't too upset. But I also waited until the second or third revision came through of the hardware.
Personally I would deal with it for a couple more months and upgrade to the "new" macbooks when they come out in a few more months. Then sell the old one on ebay for as much as you can.
there is a sucker out there who wll pay you good money and at least underwrite part of the replacement costs.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Heh - wait until the inevitable dupe then!
HP has IBM to thank for the lead they now have. Since IBM sold off its laptop division to Lenovo, the corporations ran for cover. I know my own company stopped buying Thinkpads, and now buys HPs... The corporate types want to buy from the biggest, most reliable vendor. For many that was IBM, but Lenovo didn't fit their bill, and I'm hearing a lot of them went with HP over Dell. It is an indictment of Dell and Lenovo more than a vote of confidence for HP.
Oh come on! Everyone who has ever bought a Dell product knows the difference lies in their customer service...
"Hello these ees 'Dan'...may I be of knowing and becoming on the eashew?"
One of the reasons why HP is cleaning up in the home computer and small business market vs. Dell is because of their physical presence in the local retail channel. Dell is a pure Internet mail order play, with no local retail presence. That was great 5 years ago, when Dell's rivals were bloated, smaller operations who had to maintain a retail marketing and distribution structure that handled dozens of major retailers, in addition to their corporate sales and Internet sales structures. Dell could shave a substantial percentage off the price of each PC as a result, which at the time added up to a couple hundred dollars per-PC, back when the average PC cost around $2000. Dell had no real R&D to speak of either, unlike its competitors - they were free to focus solely on lowering component and assembly costs, using stock standard designs provided by Intel.
Fast forward to 2006 though and the picture isn't so rosy for Dell. The average inflation-adjusted price of a new PC is probably closer to $1000 today. The shipping costs alone can add 5% or more to the cost of a PC, not to mention the added hassle if there's a problem and you need to return it. So Dell's mail order model has become something of a disadvantage. Everybody has implemented the kind of component and assembly optimization Dell pioneered, and they're all just putting together kits of standardized equipment supplied by the same handful of vendors - Intel, nVidia, ATI, etc., so Dell gains no traction there. The standard $1000 PC comes with so many built-in features there's little demand for the kind of customization that once set Dell apart.
On the cost side, Carly butchered HP's workforce, so a lot of the old R&D overhead is gone, and HP has the combined retail channel of both the old HP and Compaq, plus all of their old corporate accounts. There are fewer retail players to deal with as well, lowering HP's costs even more, and HP's size gives them more leverage to push retailers around with. In this new environment, HP is poised to beat Dell at their own game.
The only problem is, this has turned into an extremely low-margin game for all of the players. HP makes a lot of revenue off the PC market, but their margins are all in corporate hardware and services and of course in printer ink that costs more per-ounce than gold. Beyond that, they're now a hollowed-out shell, living off of support for legacy products designed and frequently sold a decade ago. Corporate hardware is slowly marching down the commoditization path as well, though it's probably 5-10 years behind the kind of margin erosion we've seen in the PC space.
IBM saw what was coming and bailed on the PC market a couple of years ago, retreating entirely to the corporate space. HP bet the company on beating Dell, and while it looks like they may in fact pull that feat off, my guess it's going to be a pyrrhic victory. I think the PC market isn't going to be worth diddlysquat in a couple of years. Apple is rapidly carving out a big niche for itself in the only remaining retail segment that's profitable - the high end. That leaves everybody else - Lenovo, HP, Dell, Toshiba, Sony, Gateway - to squabble over the low margin to no margin mid and low end of the market. I think it's only a matter of time before most of them are squeezed out, leaving probably just Lenovo and either Dell or HP standing.
Which of those two ultimately wins out probably depends upon when the Chinese enter the printer market and begin to consume market share from HP. If it happens within the next 3 years, Dell will probably be victorious, as HP will have its legs shot out from beneath it due to the drop in sales of their highest-margin retail product, printer ink. If cheap printer rivals don't enter the market in the next 3 years, HP will probably survive as the other big player in the PC market, leaving Dell to implode as their revenues continue to decline.
In the end, IBM will probably buy out the loser in that battle, take the corporate hardware and service for its