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

To: Michael Bakunin who wrote (112063)	3/25/1999 1:22:00 PM
From: BGR	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Michael, Emachines will definitely make a buyer from a small company look up and take notice. But don't forget about support, which for a mid-to-large size company will almost invariably be a very important factor. Emachines will have a hard time competing here. Selling in the corporate sector is a tricky game, installing 20 machines says nothing really in the corporate domain. For a company like Boeing, for example, that's peanuts. If they are going for a standarized company-wide network of PCs they are almost invariably going to consider total cost of ownership, where the actual hardware cost is but a small fraction in the present networked windows based box systems (rest is installation, upgrades, maintainence and support). There is a good reason for corporate inertia. This may change with server-based thin client computing (which needs broadband to succeed). I strongly believe in that model and it is already gaining increasingly wider acceptance. Which is why I think DELL's server and storage businesses are key. Also, DELL has been making Linux moves for a while (note that in the past they were in the position of being the only server maker w/o an Unix offerring). So, it is not clear that they are joined at the hip to the MSFT world. But, I do agree that it is a huge risk to assume that DELL's success in the higher end corporate domain is guanranteed. I remain cautiously optimistic. As for broadband, as I see it, the PC boom in the corporate sector in the early 90's had two major drivers, client-server computing and personal productivity tools. I posit that the next corporate PC boom will be driven by internet-protocol-based distributed applications connecting diverse companies and customers together (kind of like the DELL BTO and DELL-INTC direct procurement models). This needs broadband, not merely for home and office, but across the world for all places where business takes place (an airport, a subway station, a hospital ...). What the applications are going to be ... who knows ... but human creativity has little bounds. Provide the infrastructure and the s/w engineers and architects will come up with the innovations. This is a very general answer, but that is the best I can offer at present ... but I am hugely optimistic of what the future holds. -BGR.