>>And when the poor guinea pigs who take the freebies or the $400 specials without
a floppy, without a CDrom or DVD device, with minimal memory, with no monitor
or some lousy resolution unsaleable piece of crap, without sufficient software to
exchange information with their buddies or do basic home computing, etc., my
guess is that Dell will be there to handle their upgrade.<<
You might want to pay a little more attention to the cheap machines, Ian. I bought one (a CPQ) in January for ~$500. It included floppy, CDRom, plenty of memoryv (32MB I think), and three different ISP intro packages with browser software. No monitor and no office applications, but plenty of juice to handle even the full-blown MS-Office package. I don't expect the user (my mother) to need an upgrade for quite some time.
Yeah, sure, this was in January during channel de-stuffing time, but it's like rebates on new cars. Consumers learn to expect them, and then refuse to buy at all without them.
Katherine
PS I am not long or short DELL. I looked at them very hard, but decided the Internet infrastructure companies like CSCO were a better bet. All the growth of the Internet, and earnings too! |
