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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (121836)	5/3/1999 12:26:00 PM
From: Chuzzlewit	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 176387

Scott, I believe Meathead talked at great length about the total cost of ownership, and that is where Dell shines. Dell detractors seem to focus on the price of the machine rather than the total costs which include a raft of issues which are subsumed under the heading of "virtual integration". One of the things I do for a living is to try to minimize costs for client businesses. The way I do that is through an approach originally called "engineering economy", and now called discounted cash flow. Basically, you seek to minimize your total cost by including all of the anticipated cash flows together with their timing in a cash-flow model. Using an appropriate discount rate you estimate the annual cost of ownership of various alternative hardware solutions. The Dell model lends itself particularly well to this kind of analytic framework because of the intrinsic cost minimization features of virtual integration in the corporate environment. The challenge will be for Dell to somehow migrate that approach to the consumer marketplace. I believe that Gigabuys.com will become more closely integrated with the box assembly operation. I recall that one of the reasons I bought a Gateway machine over a Dell (almost 2 years ago) was that I could get a SCSI CD ROM factory installed from Gateway. Dell did not offer that installation option. If I represent a microcosm of a Dell retail customer it is clear that I too want maximum configuration flexibility and the greatest amount of preloaded preconfigured software possible. TTFN, CTC