Thank you for your reply, Shawn. I agree with what you say and would like to address a few of your comments:
>They need a better leadership who
>posses both technical insights and business drive, or even just some common sense
>in how to compete with a strong competitor such as Dell who has been doing
>everything right.
By omission you have hit on something very important. CPQ has the technical expertise. CPQ has business drive. Using merely their CPQ Direct web site on which I base my comment, what they lack is a coordinating person/group between the two. I am an academic and do socio-cultural research. A number of my colleagues from grad school decided to get jobs with major corporations rather than look for university appointments. Some work for big-name cable companies and other tech corporations. They do cultural research, filling the gap between the techie-types and the business people.
It looks to me as if CPQ should get hold of some people to do comparative studies of Dell and all other companies that sell directly through the web, not on the dollars and cents or volume levels but from a purely comparative basis, the pros and cons from a potential shopper's point of view. Heck, I could _easily_ do this and there are others who could, too.
>Am I wrong to feel that where Dell
>and Compaq are directly competing, Dell seems to be a lot smarter
I'm going to contact some of my friends from grad school after Christmas. Right now I recall some of them talking about Dell hiring social scientists a few years ago. If this is true, Dell has a core of people filling the middle ground I refer to in my previous paragraph: M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s in social science fields who are highly computer literate. These people do not make business decisions. Neither do they get involved with the technology itself. They obtain the critical information on which the others can act so there is coordination between goals.
Lynn |
