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

To: BGR who wrote (109324)	3/12/1999 8:06:00 PM
From: BGR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Thread, FYI. exchange2000.com -BGR.

To: BGR who wrote (109324)	3/12/1999 8:34:00 PM
From: Kenneth Aird	Respond to of 176387

Your are very welcome. My wife talks to a lot of "ordinary" people, as opposed to the engineers I hang out with at work, and she also told me the people she has talked to have never heard of dell.com, while they have heard of AOL, for example. That does not surprise me since most of Dells advertising to date has been in the business media and targeted at the business people who have been their primary customers to date. This is only speculation, but several pieces of evidence suggest that Dell is getting serious about taking a bigger share in the rapidly growing consumer market. During the Gigabuys presentation they mentioned that 40% of Dells sales during the Christmas season were placed over the internet. It was at just this time that the project to create the Gigabuys site was initiated. Dell just quietly introduced a Dimension model for under $1000, monitor included. In the question and answer session someone asked if Dell would use cross linking from other web sites and other such methods to draw people to dell.com and the answer was a resounding yes, many such methods would be used. A few days later the checkout at amazon.com is linked to dell.com, providing a huge potential source of pre-qualified customers, namely those who have actually made a purchase as opposed to just browsing. Now Paine Webber is saying that "management also spoke of an expanding consumer strategy, which has Dell bringing leading technology to the lower-ASP tiers of the market" as "Dell's leverage of the web allows for profitable operation in the segment". It is pretty clear to me that Dell intends to take the high end of the consumer PC segment, and Gigabuys is part of a strategy to provide the best total buying experience to the consumer with the minimum possible overhead. Judging by the latest results from CompUSA, which is the only major computer store left in my town, they may be succeeding already. Ken