Michael Dell Dismisses Tablet Threat To the PC Market

alphadogg writes with an excerpt from a Network World article: "The PC is not likely to be challenged by the tablet or the smartphone, and many users of the Internet on these devices will turn to the PC for a better experience, Michael Dell said in Bangalore on Monday. If you were going off to college and could only have one device, you would choose the PC over a smartphone or a tablet, said Dell, whose company also sells smartphones. 'If you could have two devices, then you would probably choose the phone before the tablet,' the Dell CEO added."

Comments

Only a threat in multiple computer households

[pavon]

Agreed. On the other hand, I imagine that a fair number of the tablets sold went to people who were thinking about buying a laptop/netbook as a second computer, but then opted for the tablet instead.

Re:Only a threat in multiple computer households

[iluvcapra]

Michael Dell is usually right about that kind of thing. That's not because I'm any kind of fangirl, or because I used to work for him, just that he's historically been pretty good at predicting market trends.

Michael Dell got ahead of this one: direct-marketing PCs works as a business model, and commoditization makes PC hardware mainly a supply chain management business. That was in 1984 and he rode this insight to victory!

Aside from that, it's been mostly misses, he's been cursed ever since he gave his free advice to Steve Jobs in 1997. He might occasionally prognosticate but he doesn't put his money where his mouth is. Dell completely misread media players and mobile, and its market share and profit margin off PCs has been in decline for years. It has not service or cloud strategy, no content strategy, no real brick and mortar retail, something hardware manufacturers have been getting into over the past decade. It's a mess, it's like they're still in 1997 and have their sights dead-set on Packard Bell.

Re:Only a threat in multiple computer households

[mjwx]

Dells primary audience is business, tablets are consumer items and rarely used in businesses.

Yeah, I remember when people around here used to say that about iPhones.

And it's still true. I have yet to see a job where an Iphone is an advantage, let alone a necessity.

If a business mandates a phone, it's likely to be a Blackberry (I.E. the business is running BES). Otherwise an Iphone is no different to a WinMo, WP7 or Android device and run from the same POP or ActiveSync service.

By the same token

[hardtofindanick]

If you were going off to college and could only have one device,

Let's turn that around:
If you were home, which device would be the first to pick?
If you were at the beach, which device would you pick?
If you were on a train which device would you pick?

It is kind of obvious that PC is for work and tablet is for fun. No clear winner here.

Re:By the same token

[Anonymous Coward]

You should tell the couple thousand nurses that work for us that their iPads are only for fun

Kodak thought so too...

[Tangential]

From Kodak's 2002 Annual Report:

Our traditional film business is sound as digital imaging continues to evolve.

That was 10 years ago. The typical end-user desktop/notebook world probably has a similar life left. Just as a few specialty photographers still need film, there will always be niche professionals that need high-end desktop or notebooks, but most end users won't.

Re:He's probably right.

[the_B0fh]

At work, there's a couple of VPs whose passwords expired because they haven't logged in to their windows PC, but have been using their ipad/iphone for everything.

So, different uses for different people.

It's all about the applications

[roc97007]

As soon as the apps I need are available and can be reasonably manipulated on a tablet, the laptop will be dead to me. Moreover, a tablet with sufficient resources could easily take the place of my PC, with *at most* a docking station.

Michael will continue to be right for awhile, but inevitably at some point he will be wrong. Hopefully (in my opinion) soon.

Re:It's all about the applications

[Burning1]

A friend of mine in college made a very good point.

She was watching the tablet owners walk into class.... Set up their tables in their docing stations and folding holders, lay out their bluetooth keyboards, plop down their mice, and prepare to work. Comparably, the laptop owners could set their device down, open it up, and begin talking notes.

The advantage of a tablet is lost when you have to carry around all the acessories you'd expect to see on a full size computer. The laptop will continue to improve. There's a nich for a tablet - some things it's more convenient for than a full size laptop... But also some real disadvantages. i don't see the laptop going away anytime soon.

Re:Mr Dell's reality distortion field

[Ethanol-fueled]

Exactly. As somebody above said, any PC made in 2006 is more than powerful enough to do almost anything other than play the latest bleeding-edge games. Aside from gaming and other extreme-performance, there is no longer a credible excuse to keep shoving the latest specs up the average consumer's ass.

Incidentally, I have 2 Dell computers I bought refurbished originally manufactured in 2004(laptop) and 2005(desktop) that I bought for a couple hundred dollars each, and both with linux installed perform superior to more recent Windows systems with security suites. I love showing off the fancy Compiz effects to Mac users while telling them that my whole desktop setup cost only 400$ including a new name-brand 23" flatscreen.

Re:He's probably right.

[hey!]

Real work? Depends on what you mean. A new tool often *redefines* what "real" work is, although we'll have to wait and see. I certainly see tablets taking over much of the information *consumption* tasks done on a desktop computer.

This is how it has always worked. We didn't stop using mainframes when minicomputers came along; some of the tasks that used to be done in major datacenters were moved out to smaller installations and big iron actually bifurcated into two new market segments, each larger than the parent: high performance computing for weather prediction and such, and mainframes for moving vast volumes of data around ultra-reliably.

When PCs came along people stopped doing most interactive work directly on mini-computers via dumb terminals. We renamed "minicomputers" "servers" and focused them on providing data services to personal computers. The market for servers is certainly far larger than the mini-computer market was in 1981 when IBM introduced the PC (or in 1977 when Apple introduced the Apple II).

What happens when a new product category is created is that it becomes an area of fast growth, which sucks *attention*, but not necessarily profit from the old ones. It may in some cases spur growth, as desktops spurred the growth of the server business. The days of almost guaranteed exponential growth are long gone in the PC business, but it is possible that tablets rather than cannibalizing the PC business, will re-focus it.

At least probably. Predicting the future is hard, especially since we're dealing with *two* emergent techologies: really capable mobile devices and cloud services over ubiquitous networks. But *historically* when a class of smaller, cheaper, more convenient computing devices is created, what *had* been the low end segment doesn't really suffer. On the other hand individual firms (like DEC or Wang) *do* suffer when they fail to adapt to changes in the markets they were successful in.

Re:He's probably right.

[aristotle-dude]

Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration.

Do you mean like a doctor at a hospital looking at CTC scan or chart? Do you mean like a plant of warehouse working checking inventory? A meeting attendee reviewing meetings notes/annotating those notes? Is it not real work for someone to show their client a prospectus on a tablet and being able to make quick alterations on the device while meeting with them? What do you define as "real work"?

I would think that it would be equally frustrating to work with a laptop without a wireless connection. Many tablets like the iPad 2 come in 3G cellular data models so that takes care of the lack of "wireless".

Re:Also, if you owned Apple

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention how many CEOs had Bill Gates' home number and could call and say "Bill give me a hand" and actually have him do it? Oh Gates wasn't doing it to be nice for sure, he knew if Apple went tits up that antitrust was gonna rip him a new asshole, but despite the fact Apple guys HATE to admit this Gates really helped to calm the market and get developers back on board with Apple. Remember at that time the investors were shitting kittens and the stock was doing lousy thanks to all those "Is this the death of Apple?" stories being run at the time but when Gates showed up and said to the effect 'We believe Apple has a bright future so we are gonna invest in their stock and make sure Microsoft software is available to the Mac" a LOT of developers and investors said "Hey, if Gates thinks there is money to be made there maybe there is!". Of course the money was a pittance compared to what Apple had but it was the act that helped to calm the panicked market.

As for TFA? anybody that says the tablet is gonna wipe out the PC has been slurping too much koolaid, it would be like saying 'This new moped will wipe out the trucking industry!" and is just as dumb. Wanna know why PC sales have slowed? Its because PCs have passed "good enough" several miles back and the simple fact is they are now insanely overpowered compared to most of the jobs folks have. I got rid of my full size laptop for a $350 AMD E-350 netbook, why? Because the full size was frankly overkill and in fact the E-350 is overkill for what i need on the road but its smaller and lighter. Hell my mom has the slowest PC in my family and its a fricking 3.06Ghz Celeron and all she does is play Age Of Empires and look up recipes! In just my family we are up to FIVE desktops and THREE laptops, what would we need more PCs for?

Tablets are selling because they are new and there are still folks that want one that haven't got one, that's all. With PCs the OEMs got used to everyone chunking every 3 years thanks to the MHz wars but the wars are over and even the lowest AMD or Intel dual frankly twiddles its thumbs a good 90% of the time because the things folks are using them for simply doesn't need THAT much power. Hell my kids have been gaming for the past 4 years on Pentium Ds and are just now reaching the point where games need more power, I slap in a $120 AMD triple core bundle and they'll probably get at least another year or two before i need to toss their HD4850 GPUs. There just aren't any killer apps that are requiring folks to chunk and with Windows getting a decade or more of support there just isn't a point tossing before EOL anymore. Name one job your average non gaming Joe Blow is gonna have that is gonna stress even the bottom of the line AMD triple huh? Mafia Wars? Farmville? Their FB page? Most of my customers buying now simply won't replace their PCs again until Win 7 hits EOL in 2020 so no shit PCs aren't gonna sell like tablets, there is too much power as it is!

TL:DR? Give tablets a few more years, to where even the bottom of the line one is a dual core or better and does 1080p and watch how quickly the market slows down. Most of my customers that bought tablets are using them for glorified eReaders simply because they fricking hate writing on the things, nothing beats a keyboard for text.