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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hpeace who wrote (9796)	11/28/1997 11:05:00 PM
From: Meathead	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

steve - "micheal dell has become so rich he has lost track on what real Americans go through....how will he know that if you are inventive you can always optimize....the real life stuff has become beneath him...." I know you don't really believe this and just wanna pick a fight. Would you say the same about Ekhard? You know darn well you don't believe Dell is in la la land. It's his lifes work to know every nuance of this business. His ego is way bigger than yours so failure is not an option<gg>. If you want to convince me that the low end is going to displace enough high end system sales to crush margins, your gonna have to back it up with hard statistics. The stats I want don't exist. For instance, of the 10M business systems sold in the third quarter.. how many 133, 166, 200, 233 ect were sold into what types of businesses and for what purposes. Hard numbers and details on system configurations, software, applications and intended use to be compared against previous quarters. I need to be able to see the erosion taking place. Otherwise, you and I will just be flappin our gums arguin about something no one can prove right now... only time will tell. Can anyone extrapolate meaningful trends and shifts into the way this power is being leveraged by corporate america from IDC and DataGuess numbers? Not really. The executive teams at Dell, CPQ, IBM, HP have anything but lost touch with reality, they have a better handle on that stuff than anyone. Dell knows their customers especially well, they have account executives and marketing gurus with their lips firmly glued to the butt of each corporate customer, they understand every detail of their purchasing needs and desires as of today and for tomorrow. Right now, those accounts are saying "we want the latest and greatest feature set". What should Dell do? Say "no you don't! you want these de-featured boxes and we want to sell em to ya so we can make less money". I mean, seriously, this is what's going on... that's not being out of touch with your customers. Meanwhile, consumer america is saying "we don't wanna pay for features we don't need". They want 2nd & 3d PC's for the household... for the kids. Yes, low end Consumer PC's are gonna be huge in terms of volume and Compaq will dominate in that market but the needs of business and consumer are becoming radically different. You have proven your point over and over about the computing needs of the I/S you implement. No one doubts that. But it's one piece of one segment of many segments. I know of manufacturing facilities in Austin that still run on 286/DOS... RBase and DBase for all their RDB needs communicating over ethernet. Their needs are just to track hundreds of thousands of pieces of inventory, run reports, alert to reorder points/quantities etc. They can upgrade now or still get a lot of life out of their 8 year old systems... maybe even extend it indefinately. Paul Engel over on the Intel thread says it best, "never assume your computing needs are the same as everyone else's" I have to side with Dell's management on this one, for now, until I see hard evidence not just anecdotal accounts of observations you have made in your profession nor should you put much faith in mine (not that you do)<ggg>. MEATHEAD