To: edamo who wrote (133990 ) 6/23/1999 12:13:00 AM From: Mohan Marette Read Replies (3) | Respond to
From the PCExpo-Michael Dell: Dell's CEO says PCs are 'alive and thriving' But Dell's strength lies in sales and marketing of PCs, not in the development and leadership of the PC industry. As Dell settles into its new role atop the PC world, many are looking to the Texas-based company to help define the future of the platform.The PC has certainly gained in importance. As distributed computing has evolved, users have had more power and control available to them. The interface and power have improved, and there are more tools at lower costs than ever before. I think that will continue. The PC is at the center of the information universe. The proliferation of connected devices, whether handhelds or whatever, will continue. But the PC will be the preferred way to store and manage information. You will have these other devices, and the PC will be the focal point; like a server. The PC is alive and thriving. Everybody is connected to the Internet. At gigabuys.com, we are actually selling a lot of those devices. But we don't have any plans to put research and development dollars in those businesses. In the business market in the U.S., we are No. 1 [in sales]. We are investing $400 million in research and development this year, and have taken a much more pronounced role in the standards organizations. There are some things that are not logical in the industry right now -- all of the docking stations [for notebooks] are different. We've been proposing [standardization] for a long time and haven't been able to get folks to agree. You could even make the I/O modules standard. All of those would be positive for the customer. I think we can do a lot better job of things like that. I also think we can do a lot in moving off of some of the old legacy features that have driven a lot of costs. For example, some of the old I/O ports. You could consolidate them and replace [them] with USB. That would give you a lot more flexibility with form factor. Or DOS, when is the last time you used DOS? That doesn't make a lot of sense. At some point you need to break away from the past. This trend will continue and we want to sell the servers and storage to the ASP [application service provider] and the hosting companies. I think this is a logical progression in shared power and I think it will increase. One of the biggest factors that will drive the PC business is broadband communications. Those are major catalysts for the PC industry. What is emerging is that people want more powerful machines because if you have a more powerful [communication] line, you want a more powerful PC. Video streaming on a network terminal? Not going to happen. My belief is that as bandwidth increases, so does the importance of power. The preference for direct is overwhelmingly strong. And I think if you look at our growth, it is pretty clear what is happening. We have about 10 percent market share on a global basis, and I think we have an opportunity to get about 20 percent. The enterprise server and storage market will be fast-growing areas for us. I think the opportunities are very clear for us, and we are quite focused and have our strongest competitive stance yet.
