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

To: Jeff Mills who wrote (20906)	11/8/1997 3:50:00 PM
From: hpeace	Respond to of 176387

what a laugh, apple can't even clean dell's shoes.

To: Jeff Mills who wrote (20906)	11/8/1997 4:46:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Some opinions on Apple's direct threat. More and more, Boxmakers are targeting Dell's model... sort of. The only chance any have to properly duplicate and compete head to head is to eliminate presence in the retail channel entirely. I and many others don't think you can straddle the fence on this one. Nor have I seen a sensible strategy as to how to offer systems direct and thru the retail simultaneously that would benefit everyone. Here is a response to Apple's new directive by John Purins that I found to be pretty in-line with reality.. "I'm not a Mac user but I do know that Apple had good technology at one time. The problem is that the creative people who developed this technology were ousted and big business types came in and drove the company into the ground. Now the Wintel alliance controls around 95% of the market. Whether or not Apple sells directly is of little or no consequence as we're really talking about how to slice up less the 5% of the pie. The argument over which technology is better seems to be getting more and more irrelevant and appears to be headed the same way as VHS vs Betamax. Just because the Betamax technology was better did not mean a thing in the end. Market presence and force decided the issue. <SNIP> What Apple should be doing is, number one, design machines that are technically superior that will be accepted by mainstream business users. This is where the bulk of the market is at. To do this, at this late stage of the game, is no small feat but I think that there is an opportunity. Microsoft's software has become so bloated with 'features' that installing any Windows program anymore requires hundreds of megabytes of disk space. Industry surveys show that 90% of the users use 10% of these features. In other words, most of what's in this software just takes up room, slows down performance and makes the software so complicated that it is inevitably full of bugs. This is where the opportunity presents itself. Build machines and software that contains the functions that 90% of users require and get rid of the rest. If Apple did this right, and then did whatever was necessary to court developers and sell machines, they might succeed. I'm a software developer and probably one of the crucial keys to a platforms acceptance is to have developers developing for that platform. This means providing software developers with the tools necessary to do the job even if you have to give them away. Apple has a nasty habit of trying to control these things and trying to keep them to themselves. This does not work... just ask IBM about its PS/2. The bottom line is that if Apple is to survive, it will have to truly offer a better alternative to Wintel. Not just a glitzier marketing effort but a truly superior technology. With Jobs onboard again it has a better chance of happening but the clock is ticking." Michael Dell is right, they should just close the thing down and give the shareholders all their money back. MEATHEAD