Ted, sorry, a little too arcane description of Dell and their R&D, or lack of it. What I meant is that Dell, unlike IBM, HP and Compaq, relies almost completely on other companies, like Intel, Seagate, Samsung, Microsoft, etc. in doing all the R&D that goes into their products. The other 3 are capable of doing their own mobos, chipsets, software, etc., to design in features that differentiate. Things in the areas of built-in RAID control, Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters for SAN control, clustering hooks, RAS features, etc. Dell really is a system integrator and manufacturer, sheet metal bender to be harsh, whereas the others are system designers. Check Dell's R&D expenditures, as a function of revenues sometime. It's very telling.
Tony |
