Bill, intermediaries, gotcha.
People in the know tell me that dell servers are not as good and IBM and CPQ servers? That may be, but they are cheap and greshams' law of servers is at work, same as it is in computers.
Dell does most of their server business at the low end, 1P and 2P. These are low margin, and Dell still beats the crap out of price. Compaq has 60% of the 8-ways (+/- a couple points, sure of that) and about 40% of the 4-ways. Those command a higher margin. Compaq is also a high R&D spending, innovative company, designing servers from the ground up, including chipsets sometimes, ROC (raid on chip), smart array controllers, other stuff. Dell is mostly a system integrator: no design excepy maybe mobos. Compaq also designs all of their own storage systems, including a lot of high availability, disaster recovery and other SW, as EMC does. Obviously, I prefer Compaq over Dell.
As far as ossification, Compaq is moving more to the Dell model in PCs, but to tell you the truth, they would be happy to break even there, have the PC to fill out the entire handheld to supercomputer line, and make their money on everything else.
Tony |
