<<Does anyone really understand the significance of Dell's shortfall?>>
Dell said, that seeing Y2K slowdown in November, they tried to switch to high end consumer sales, using the newest "parts". These turned out to not be consistently obtainable.
One could posit this: AMD switched production to higher end chips, forcing INTC to put newer products on the market before they were originally scheduled. This resulted in some glitches as well as yield problems at the higher speeds. Intel's Fabs were also producing motherboard and other products. The race to, and far beyond, 1ghz chips with accompanying higher speed sophisticated RAM, etc is very likely to keep inventories of the latest chips tight for the next few years.
At a minimum, Dell will not be able to get the benefit of falling prices which also help the direct model.
Another question is why the Y2K problem affected Dell so much and not CPQ? Especially since it wasn't supposed to affect Dell, per both Mike and the analysts.
ted |
