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Now That It's Private, Dell Targets High-End PCs, Tablets
jfruh writes: If Dell has a reputation in the PC market, it's as the company that got low-end PCs to customers cheaply. But after the great drama of founder Michael Dell taking the company private, the company is following a new path, adding higher-quality (and more expensive) products like the Venue 8 7000, the thinnest tablet on the market today, to its lineup. One analyst notes that "Because they are no longer reporting to Wall Street, they can be more competitive."
They can focus on long term rather than short term profits.
Its really more in the greater ability to take risks and make quick decisions.
Share holders want maximum short term profits. This often conflicts with the overall health of the company.
Shareholders are shortsighted. Everything is quarter to quarter these days. Google has shareholders, but Page and Brin own the majority of the shares so they have control, and when shareholders give them shit every year for spending so much money and resources on failed side ventures and pie in the sky stuff like self-driving cars, they tell the other shareholders to get bent, because they can't be raided by people like Carl Icahn and have their company taken from them because they're not giving a higher dividend or because their R&D budget is absurd.
One analyst notes that "Because they are no longer reporting to Wall Street, they can be more competitive."
The problem isn't Wall Street. Its the board members. And lots of companies thrive just fine as public companies because the board is taking the long view, selects a CEO with vision, and then lets him pursue it.
While you have a toxic board that is only looking to milk the company, selects weak CEOs, and structures management compensation to incent short-term thinking then you've got a problem.
I guess taking it private is one way to get rid of a toxic board, and good for Dell if they can reinvent themselves this way. But the problem isn't faceless "wall street".
Instead, name and shame the Dell board members. They were the ones enforcing the short term outlook.
In 2009, Dell caught headlines with its premium Adamo slim laptop, which was considered a competitor to the MacBook Air at the time.
Yes. "at the time." And remember the Dell competitor to the iPod? There are several problems for Dell here. 1) They are a maker of commodity hardware trying to move upmarket. But the fewer units they sell, the worse their economies of scale, so how to really make something special, without having to charge too much? Apple doesn't have that problem, in part because they sell 6-8 figures of even their high-end products. 2) Sure, Slashdot readers may be an exception, but most people who want Android and Windows machines rarely want expensive ones. So most of their target market will either want a cheaper Android tablet, or, if they want to spend more, they'll get an iPad.
I think the best Dell can hope for is to be a niche player, a slightly bigger version of their subsidiary Alienware. 15 years ago, Dell and Microsoft both seemed unstoppable, but both have repeatedly stumbled since then. My, how the mighty have fallen.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
In April Google also did a stock split, and started offering Class-C shares that trade under "GOOGL", they have 0 voting rights. Granted you can still purchase class-A shares, as before...but even before this stock split there were still two classes of shares: :: available to the public, and
Class-B :: - primarily held by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt.
Class-A
Class-B shares have 10 times the voting rights of Class-A, and gives the Class-B holders 61%+ of the voting rights.