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

To: Jim Patterson who wrote (51324)	7/14/1998 6:21:00 PM
From: Achoo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

<...What I am talking about may be 5 years away. By then, DELL may be the only PC maker that cares about making money on PC's. The other integrated companies, CPQ IBM HWP won't. This is what the whole thing comes back to. DELL need to make money on every box they sell because that is all they sell. IBM CPQ HWP are putting very competitive BTO programs and soon won't care weather they make money on the boxes or not. They are after a much bigger and much more profitable contract for service and support etc...> Jim, I don't understand how IBM CPQ HWP could keep an operation going in which they lose money on pc's but make enough to cover it on services and support. Why wouldn't someone who offers services and support only be able to do so at a cut rate, without having to offset the drag of an unprofitable manufacturing operation? Or perhaps partner with DELL, GTW, or MUEI and offer better total cost of ownership pricing? It seems that having two lean companies partner to offer what each does best is more sustainable than larger companies covering bloat from part of their business with excessive pricing in another. MarkN

To: Jim Patterson who wrote (51324)	7/14/1998 10:07:00 PM
From: K. M. Strickler	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

JP, >>> IBM CPQ HWP are putting very competitive BTO programs and soon won't care weather they make money on the boxes or not. They are after a much bigger and much more profitable contract for service and support ect. <<< OK - I just have to ask! What is support? When I worked for IBM on the big systems, it took time and effort to install the system, and an ongoing maintenance plan to insure that the devices were cleaned regularly, and tuned up for optimum performance. ( Read that, 'in order to run at all'! ) Now I have called 'support' a couple of times, and had very good response. I have had maybe 25 hours of support over the years that I have had the computer. It seems that as the technology continues to evolve, the computer requires less and less 'support'. The 'big' companies that require a lot of support generally have people in their IT or MIS departments that provide much of this support. In the old days, the equipment was not as reliable as the equipment of today. RAID systems, and multiple server networks seem to keep the errors, if any, transparent to the user. It is true that when the system fails, the 'fat is in the fire', but it doesn't happen all that often. Regards, Ken