“U.S. stocks lost ground Friday as disappointing quarterly results from Dell rekindled investor concern about slowing corporate earnings growth. Within the benchmark index, Hewlett-Packard fell 0.9 percent in the wake of rival Dell’s fourth quarter earnings. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was last down 26 points… The S&P 500 Index fell 1 point, to 1,196 while the Nasdaq Composite Index was off 4 points, at 2,049, albeit off an early low of 2,039.72. ‘Obviously this morning it’s a Dell problem,’ said Elliot Spar, market strategist, at Ryan, Beck & Co,” Mark Cotton reports for CBS MarketWatch.
“Dell shares were under pressure in morning trading as some analysts expressed disappointment over its fourth quarter sales, with a forecast for first quarter sales also coming in just shy of current Wall Street expectations. Dell’s report comes just one day after Hewlett-Packard removed Carly Fiorina as chief executive. Many Wall Street analysts see Dell in a prime position to take market share from H-P as it searches for a new CEO. Dell Chief Executive Officer Kevin Rollins conceded that the upheaval at H-P ‘probably is’ an opportunity for his company to expand business beyond its prior expectations. Dell shares tumbled as much 5 percent, and were last trading down 4.5 percent, at $39.68,” Cotton reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: What would we do if we were in charge of Dell? We’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders. 
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Apple announces two-for-one stock split – February 11, 2005
Lenovo is coming Michael. Your days on top are numbered…
Reaper: Michael was never a top. Always been a bottom.
I keed.
MDN: reading your take it is clear you have no idea about how to run a company. Much as I like my Mac, knocking profitable businesses like Dell seems a bit imature to me. Stick to posting news stories.
It’s only the first one of many others to come along this year
Benn,
MDN was throwing Michael Dell’s words back in his face. It was he who said that Apple should sell the company and give the proceeds to the shareholders. And yes, he was being serious. If MDN doesn’t know how to run a company, what does it say about Michael Dell’s knowledge of Apple?
Fsck Dull and all their bottom-of-the-barrel products.
Viridan: Just because Michael Dell spews nonsense it doesnt make it OK for MDN to do the same. Clueless coments are cluless comments regardless of who makes them. MDN is a great site when it reports the news – but when it comes to the (anonymous) editors opinions it shows iteself up. Who is the person behind MDN anyway? Some other 18 year old geek like thinksecret?
Yikes, relax. Joking is fun, remember!
Geez Benn, it was a joke (notice the smiley?). Lay off the caffiene.
Benn,
I don’t mean to argue, but if Dell continues to underperform, instead of losing money and stock value over the next several years, wouldn’t it be more profitable to the shareholders to shut down right now? If so, then a CEO with the shareholders best interests in mind could do what MDN suggests. Dell shutting down would also be a benefit to many consumers as well. Additionally, running a company isn’t always about how profitable the company is, but can also include its impact on society. Dell has indeed been profitable, but whether it has had a positive impact is very debatable.
I do agree with you that some of MDN’s comments may seem a bit harsh, but in this instance, I don’t see any offense.
Michael Dell should never, ever be allowed to live down that infamous quote and it should be thrown back in his face as often as possible. Just as Bill Gates should never be allowed to live down the quote of 640K of RAM being enough for anyone…even though he (quite conveniently) denies he ever said it now.
While I too love my Mac (PB), Dell has had a positive impact by pushing down prices for consumers through increased efficiency. That not only benefited Windows consumers, but I bet we wouldn’t have seen the Mac mini if Windows PCs hadn’t been dropping steadily in price the last couple of years–so Dell has also benefited many Mac Users. You can’t say Dell is a bad company because of Windows–they didn’t have the option of licensing Mac OS X, and if they weren’t the leader among Windows PC distributors, some other company would be. Dell did innovate in a business sense, by wringing out efficiencies in production, inventory, and sales through it’s on-line store and internal management processes.
BTW, I would never dream of owning a Dell computer, of course.
Dell has totallty de-valued the computer and the IT industry to the point of most pcs being ‘average’.
no offense to this site, but it HAS to be a teenage boy running this place. I can’t imagine anyone else.
No one runs MDN, it runs itself.
Here’s a quick question – once Dell has undercut and generally devalued the Wintel market to the point that it is the last man standing, who’s going to do their R&D?
God knows, they have no culture of “real” innovation – so they have nobody at the top who would really know what they’re doing, how to spend the money, how to run the projects. On top of that, their tradition of being a parasite on the industry means that they’d never quite commit wholeheartedly to the effort.
Guess Dell didn’t heed the warning – “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.” (Abraham Lincoln)
Many of those post on this site (myself included) have removed lots of doubts, many, many times over – and it doesn’t matter how old you are, either.
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“Here’s a quick question – once Dell has undercut and generally devalued the Wintel market to the point that it is the last man standing, who’s going to do their R&D?”
Gosh, the same people who do it know of course, the engineers at Apple computer.
Brought to you by the word ‘voice’ as in: allow me to voice my cocern for dell investors
I’m imature too. “SCREW DELL” If your going to bad mouth another company like Dell did then you open yourself for criticism yourself. If I had stock in Dell I’ll be selling fast.
If you buy a DELL, you’ll go to HELL
I make a point of quoting this childish and rhythmically incorrect couplet to every Dell owner I can, just to annoy them.
jshuteye: at the moment, there’s still a middle-man between Apple’s R&D and Dell’s ultimate rip-off.
My question is: once HP leave the market, who’s going to do the quarter-assed hardware knock-off work that Dell can then plagiarise?
DELL IS HELL.
MDN is more than just the headlines. I get as much or even more out of the comments as I do out of the Article and MDNs take. Lots of high powered people hang out here.
For every smart-arse comment that MDN makes about Microsoft and the Pee Cees there are one hundred uninformed journalists talking about Macs that are “too expensive”, Mac OS software that is “not compatible with Windows” and my personal favourite, that the iPod is “only compatible with songs purchased from the iTunes Music Store.” In context of the mainstream media’s approach to Apple I see nothing wrong with MDN’s take on Dell’s boof-head of a CEO.
MDN needs to do their research. Dell just had record sales. Their profits were down because they paid a tax charge I believe, but they had record sales.