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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jim kelley who wrote (137784)	7/27/1999 10:49:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Jim - I guess the findings depend on who is paying for the study That's always true, but I suspect General Motors was looking to see what the lowest cost solution was for their users, not pump some specific architecture. I still have to rely on redundant systems and redundant ISP's The need for redundant ISP links has nothing to do with thick or thin clients. Presumably in any organization with more than about 10 clients, ISP service is centralized via proxy to maintain firewall control and reduce service costs, and in most cases that would include at least a fallback link. Behind the proxy, you are dependent on the reliability of ethernet (or whatever your backbone is) but that reliability is in excess of 99.9% so it is unlikely to be a significant source of downtime in any environment. As for the cost improvements, I suggest that these are currently largely fictitious. The cost savings are real, but, as you say, depend on the willingness of the IT users to accept the restrictions of a thin client environment. Maybe 1 out of 8 users would currently fit into that group. It's not everyone, but it's still a big market. The Andersen report and the EDS report should not be taken at face value, uncritically as you seem to be promoting. They are just 2 data points. But given that this market generated more than $1 billion in sales in 1998, it is certainly worth watching. There were of course many assumptions in that study which could be questioned. But whether the current market is $1B or $4B, whether the cost savings are 2 to 1 or 4 to 1, there is still a large segment of customers who find the argument compelling, many for the reasons of centralized control you mention. but then you have been promoting CPQ uncritically for several years as well. I think I'm reasonably objective about CPQ, but this discussion was about DELL, and whether they have any risk of revenue loss from thin clients (probably not), and whether they should do a more proactive thin client program (probably).