Barry,
IMO, this is exactly what is happening and has been happening for some time. The direct channel (predominantly DELL, GATE, and MUEI) has been taking market share from the traditional players and retail channel. Last year we saw the same thing when Packard Bell ended the year with a huge glut of inventory in the retail channel. I remember just after Christmas last year the pundits were crying about soft PC sales. Well, this has been a very good year for overall growth (albeit not quite as strong as the exceptional year the industry saw last year) and the direct channel continues to boom. Just look at GATE and DELL's earnings over the last 8 quarters. Make no mistake about it, HP, IBM, and CPQ are on the run from the direct channel. These guys carry virtually no inventory and have extremely low cost structures. They can respond quickly and provide good service. The Fortune 600 company I work for threw out IBM a couple years back. Sub-par quality and too pricey. At first we bought Gateways now we buy exclusive Dells. The Gateways were fine but a policy decision was made to go with a single company. We are currently in the middle of our upgrade cycle. There will be over 3000 new Dell P166-P200's at our location by mid next year. Most are already in place. I just ordered 14 new Dell P200's for my area.
I think home users have also been increaesing their purchases through the mail order channel. I have recommend PC's to at least 50 co-workers, friends, and relatives over the last 3 years. They have ALL bought direct most of them from GATE, DELL, or Micron.
The times they are changin'.
The great news is that whoever "wins" the battle of the boxes, Intel wins the CPU war and Intel stock holders win the investment game.
FF |
