Re: Has anyone compared Gateway's pricing with
Dell's pricing on comparable home pc's?
I have. Dell is beating the pants off of Gateway
in P4 system pricing on some models. Compare the
Dimension 8100 1.5Ghz to the Gateway 1500.
They're virtually identical in specs but require
a config tweak to get memory and CD/RW identical.
Dell's offering is $1219 and GTW's is $1339.
Up at 2GHz the pricing is pretty close.
PIII pricing of the 1.1Ghz is right at $900 for
both companies on identical configs except that
Dell is throwing in a free color printer to
sweetn' the deal.
We can argue about warranties but let's don't
and say we did.
At least for home PC's, I can't see where GTW is
beating Dell on pricing by very much, if at all.
The spot checks I have made show it to be slightly
in Dell's favor on most systems. Besides, margins
on these boxes at these prices are about ZERO
(if not negative) and GTW can't afford to undercut
Dell by hundreds of dollars because they have no
profitable enterprise business to help subsidize
where Dell does. The reality is that GTW can't
get parts any cheaper than Dell can... especially
on one of the most expensive... the CPU.
But I digress...
Gee, what ever happened to GTW's Profile PC? The
all in one? The Dell Killer!!! Everyone raved about
how cool it was and how Dell had fallen behind and
how GTW was going to eat Dell's lunch. I stated
that while cool, it was too expensive and basically
a non-portable notebook that a few early adopters
and artsy types might buy but that it wouldn't
generate any significant volume for them.
Boy did I get my ass chewed by several folks who
considered me a meathead. Of course when I asked
them point blank if they were going to buy one they
said no, but they were sure everyone else would.
Well, turns out, nobody really wanted one after
all because of all the same reasons I stated.
Let's not discuss the WebPC. It's buried where it
should be.
So here we are approaching 2002. Where are the
all-in-ones, the Free PC's, the I-openers, the
dedicated web terminals, the PC on a chip etc. etc.
that all these visionaries spewed anti-PC rhetoric
over and proclaimed the PCs demise long before now.
Looks to me like the PC is still IT.
Could all of these brilliant bastards actually have
been wrong? They sure generated lots and lots of
nifty headlines and the journalists loved it and
Joe public bought into the notion... literally.
The irony is that more investors bought stock
than people bought product.
What I'd like to see is an article on why we
don't need any more articles about why no one
needs a new PC.
Like I said last year more than once on this
thread... which everybody now knows, GTW is
probably not going to survive on it's own no
matter what they do. Only Apple could pull
off that kind of miracle<gg>.
MEATHEAD |
