Dell Gives Android the Boot, Boots Up More Windows 8

hugheseyau writes "Dell vice chairman Jeff Clarke made a less than shocking announcement at this year's Dell World Conference in Austin. The company is officially giving up on Android phones and tablets. ... So if Dell is giving up on Android, what comes next? The company claims it's doubling down on Windows 8, and the enterprise market."

Comments

Market changing? Not competing successfully?

[kawabago]

Customers disappearing? It's time to turn back the clock and go back to what made your name in the first place. If you're a restaurant, it's a great idea. If you're a technology company, it's suicide. Bye Dell, it was nice while you lasted!

Re:Market changing? Not competing successfully?

[epyT-R]

maybe..but that might suggest that modern day 'business sense' is part of the reason why the economy is tanking. I've seen countless examples of technology companies using the sell-a-turd-as-a-diamond marketing for new products, then, when they don't sell, killing their existing successful products which compete with them, then posting butthurt blogs whining about their lost 'vision' 12 months later as they circle the drain.

It seems most of the effort today is poured into marketing service constrained 'property' instead of selling quality goods that allow customers to own the intrinsic value. So the only way they can compete is to turn up the marketing rhetoric knob to 11 and hope they can grab the largest group of mouth breathers who don't realize what they're (not) getting.. This dynamic range has largely been filled and we're leveling out at +0db with tons of clipping. The exquisite layering of fallacy and appeals to social insecurity in modern advertising has reached mind numbing levels. It seriously can't get much worse than it is now.. It's whitenoise.

The slashdot nerd archetype isn't necessarily not business savvy because he's wrong.. He isn't considered business savvy because he's actually more closely tied to reality than today's average marketing department, corporate officer, or consumer. Now THAT should scare us all.

Re:Market changing? Not competing successfully?

[nightfire-unique]

Android devices are outselling Windows devices 2:1.

Android devices are outselling iOS devices 2:1. Windows device sales appear as a rounding error.

And why?

[LordLucless]

So why dump Android? According to Clarke, “It’s a content play with Android”. “Amazon is selling books and Google is making it up with search.

So, basically, there was competent competition, and Dell's me-toosim wasn't cutting it.

For those who didn't notice

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell made an Android tablet, known as the Dell Streak, it was not a success. Expensive, crap screen, underpowered, cheapy feeling.

So now they're switching to Windows 8, with their expensive underpowered crap screens, cheap feeling tablets, THEY'RE SURE TO BE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL!!!

Methinks they're not fixing the real problem. Android sell in bucket loads and if they couldn't sell a tablet with it, then they needed to refine their tablet designs till they did sell. Change Android for Windows 8, doesn't fix their problems, it just adds another one: no touch apps.

Re:For those who didn't notice

[fermion]

And for those who did not notice, Dell exists only because MS has made it so. Dell cow tows to the shrine of MS, keeps it own margins and quality low so that MS can rake in the cash, while assuming the risk of inventory so that MS does not have to.

Is anyone surprised that Dell is jumping on the MS Surface bandwagon.

Re:Correction: It will be irrelevant:

[Taco Cowboy]

Eventually, they'll get the hint...

By the time they got the hint, the marketplace would have pulled out the rug out from under their feet ...
 
See what happened to HP or Nokia, or Kodak?

Michael Dell on Apple

[Beer_Smurf]

"What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,"
Michael Dell

Android made phones/tablets?

[hobarrera]

To me, the news is that Dell made phones/tablets. I'd never heard of them before, nor have I ever seen any.
Am I the only one here?

In other words...

[Dcnjoe60]

In other words, Microsoft made Dell another offer they couldn't refuse by not shipping other operating systems. It's not the first time, but with the public's acceptance of Windows 8, it could be the last.

Re:good luck with that

[symbolset]

Please name me a feature that Linux has that Windows doesn't that is useful on the enterprise level.

You can use it any way you want, as much as you want, and you won't fail an audit as long as you don't publish modified code.

Re:good luck with that

[symbolset]

So... is this a suicide note?

Re:good luck with that

[cornjones]

I used to be proud of over 1 year uptimes until i realized 2 things:
1. you aren't patching enough
2. when the reboot happens and it turns out your initialization script for one of your servers wasn't tested thoughly enough (b/c you never rebooted) you have a big problem. having configured it 6 months ago (timeline from when I learned my lesson) and half remembering which configs are which is going to lead to more downtime. You should really reboot after major (re)configurations to make sure your server comes back into the fold effectively... obviously, this should be during a controlled maintenance window but preventative maintenance still counts as maintenance