“Michael Dell doesn’t want to talk about personal computers anymore,” Ben Worthen reports for The Wall Street Journal.
MacDailyNews Take: Does that include not talking about what he’d do if he were running Apple?
Worthen reports, “The 46-year-old has been acquiring high-end technologies—such as storage and security systems—that Dell can sell to businesses to lessen its reliance on selling low-margin desktop and laptop computers. Dell bought services provider Perot Systems Corp. for $3.9 billion in 2009.”
“After some shaky years, the Round Rock, Texas, company’s results have improved recently. The company has stabilized its PC business,” Worthen reports. “That said, it has made little headway in smartphones or with its Streak line of tablet computers. Dell shares are off about 35% since Mr. Dell returned as CEO in 2007.”
Dell: I’d say [the] rapid rise of the tablet. I didn’t completely see that coming. Tablets aren’t really new, in the sense that the tablet PC idea’s been around for a while. Obviously, more recent products have been much more successful. What’s interesting [is that] business users are not going to give up smartphones. Won’t give up PCs. So now you have a PC, you have a smartphone and you have a tablet. Sounds pretty good. Industry growth. What’s also interesting is Apple’s great success with the iPhone. Android comes along, even greater success. I think you’ll see the same thing on tablets, with enormous numbers of Android tablets with Dell certainly playing a role in that as well.
WSJ: Do you think Android tablets will outpace iPads moving forward?
Dell: Not tomorrow. Not the next day. But again, if you look at 18 months ago, Android phones were like, ‘What is that?’ And now there are more Android phones than iPhones. I don’t see any reason why the same won’t occur with Android tablets.
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Clueless as usual. Smartphones require carriers. With Apple stuck to AT&T as the sole U.S. carrier for so long, Android phones got a toehold among those unwilling to switch carriers. Some people obviously settled for pretend iPhones. That tide is reversing already now that Verizon has the iPhone. As contracts lapse, more and more U.S. smartphone users will go for Apple iPhones. (Android settlers aren’t the type of people to pay early termination fees, either, so Apple will have to wait for them.)
iPad, of course, does not suffer that artificial impediment to market share nor will Android tablets enjoy that artificial boost to market share. The iPad WiFi-only models are carrier-free and the 3G models are at both major U.S. carriers. That Mr. SIDAGTMBTTS doesn’t see that blatant fact is unsurprising. Somebody hold our Take up really close to the tip of his nose and maybe he’ll be able to see it then.
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Never saw the iPad coming, but now that we have the thing in our hands, it should be fairly easy to duplicate in volume. Not tomorrow. Not the day after. But our engineers are breaking down the original iPad as we speak, and our iPad 2 is shipping in 1-2 weeks, so we should be able to outpace Apple in the coming years.
Plus Mr. Dell misspoke. When he said, “I’d say [the] rapid rise of the tablet. I didn’t completely see that coming,” he meant to say, “I completely didn’t see that coming.”
Made me laugh…
Haaa! Me too… made me laugh!
Michael Dell has a lazy eye. That’s why he couldn’t completely see it coming.
Nobody saw the iPad coming, except SJ. Everybody made fun of the name. Not anymore
About this time last year, most of tech peoples yawn at iPad and said it is just a bigger iPod touch/iPhone. Who would wants that? I guess there are 4.6 millions people want it last quarter and much more in coming quarter.
They don’t see them coming because they’re clueless cloners, without any shame, instead of visionaries.
And so obnoxious!
The other part that Mickey and other “pundits” miss is that there are so many companies going to make Android tablets that Android could take 70% market share and still put a lot of companies out of business. We likely will see that in smart phones within the next year or two as well.
With the iPad growing the market it is going to be a very, very long time before the iPad starts to lose market share. For starters Android tablets are going to have to sell more devices than iPads per quarter and I just don’t see that happening.
I just don’t completely see Android being able to duplicate the experience of iPad 2. No open source project can maintain that much control over a consumer product. Fragmentation.
The entire Android platform suffers from fragmentation. It will get worse as time goes on, not better. Google already wants to be more closed like Apple with it’s Honeycomb version to minimize fragmentation.
I’m happy that Android exists. Let all the cheapskates flock to it, lured by lower prices and more whiz-bang features. I don’t want them degrading the UI with cheap phones and locked down features. I’ve always known that if you want a superior user experience then you have to pay more for it. This little truism affects everything, including phones and computers.
What lower prices? If you are comparing roughly equivalent tablets, who sells an iPad sized tablet for less tthan Apple?
What a maroon. You didn’t see tablets coming in the first place, but now suddenly you’re enough of an expert to prognosticate on their future? Lol.
He clearly remains clueless as he can’t spot the distinctions between the smartphone and tablet markets, some of which MDN pointed out in its take. Better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool, Mr. Dell, than to open it and remove all doubt.
I find it fascinating to compare the two:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=apple+dell
Love the comparison! Thanks for that link, Alex.
Yeah, great link. Too bad Wolfram Alpha has an app only for Adenoid…
Apple’s next quarterly revenue figure will exceed Dell’s market cap. STFU, Michael.
-jcr
I have ipad and i am an Apple fan but I believe that the tablets with android are going to surpass ipad soon. the cheapest cost $500 and and android tablets are from $150. logically is not the same but people don’t know that.
ipad race is similar to iPod. iPad has itune and AppStore.
Now you’re just being silly.
Aren’t you?
As soon as someone buys a $150 Android tablet, they find out right away they’ve been screwed. Most outlets will take the garbage back and let you buy something better.
Agreed!
Tried one of those resistive Android 7″ wonder… As in Wonder why anyone would keep it longer than it takes to back it back up!
Good theory man and I can see your logic but I have to agree with the others, when you get that Android tablet its the crap user experience that lets you down. My wife has a sony xperia using android and I have an iphone, the difference is unmeasureable. Build quality then user experience. I suspect android tablets will feel the same
Yes, but that Sony Xperia is stomping all over Apple’s UI patents.
Steve Jobs follows the Wayne Gretzky philosophy: Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it’s been.
Michael Dell is sitting in the penalty box wondering what happened.
The Dell Streak will have as its accompaniment the Dell Tunes store, the Dell App Store, the Dell brick & mortar store, the Dell Tunes Sync, the Dell Mobile Me app, the Dell iMac PC, all that to tie in to the Dell Streak so you have a unified infrastructure like Apple. That ought to take Michael Dell till 2100 to do.
So yeah, Mickey’s right in a way – not tomorrow, not today, it’ll take Dell 89 more years to equal Apple’s ecosystem that exists today.
If by his own admission he didn’t see the iPad coming, thought Apple was doomed several years ago, didn’t realize the Asians would undercut Dell’s business plan, thinks somehow (through his magic lens) that Android is having “greater success” than the iPhone, then why would anyone regard his opinion as anything but worthless?
*sigh* I wish people would stop saying that “Android is more successful than iPhone”. That’s disingenuous at best, because they’re comparing a platform to a single device. Android is NOT more successful than iOS, and no single Android phone is more successful than the iPhone.
Let’s take it further: the totality of Android-powered smartphones have greater combined MARKET SHARE than iOS-powered smart phones, ie, the iPhone, but to suggest that greater market share = greater success is ridiculous. Companies measure success by REVENUE AND PROFITS, and by that token, iPhone is eating everyone’s lunch. Consider: The iPhone had 16.2% of the global smart phone market share at the end of 2010, behind Android at 33%, and Nokia at 31%. The iPhone’s market share translated to only 4.2% of the entire global market for ALL mobile phones, smart or otherwise, yet this single device was vacuuming up 51% OF ALL PROFITS FOR THE ENTIRE MOBILE MARKET.
You read that correctly. A single phone is taking more than half the profits of the entire market for all mobile phones. Android is in a race to the bottom, Apple is bathing in profits, and yet Android proponents and clueless journalists continue to beat the dead horse that the iPhone is somehow falling victim to Android.
It gets worse for Android if you compare platform to platform. There is no Android equivalent of the iPod touch, and Android tablets are cannon fodder for the iPad juggernaut. Android is having their ass handed to them by iOS, no matter what anyone would like to believe. Couple this with the fact that iOS developers are far more likely to get paid than Android devs, and it’s a no brainer which platform is the more attractive one, for consumers and developers.
“… this single device was vacuuming up 51% OF ALL PROFITS FOR THE ENTIRE MOBILE MARKET.
You read that correctly. A single phone is taking more than half the profits of the entire market for all mobile phones.”
*massive sigh*
Please don’t take this personally as I’m sure you don’t mean that way, but I’ve heard this information expressed, ad nauseum, this way… usually by PC pundits or other expressing some negative Apple sentiments. I wish people would stop wording in this fashion, as it implies Apple is doing something (also usually expressed as unfair, immoral or illegal) at the expense of competitors.
Apple isn’t “taking” profits. Apple is “making” profits.
There’s a big difference.
But, otherwise, I agree with you totally… you’re spot on.
“Dell shares are off about 35% since Mr. Dell returned as CEO in 2007.”
Wow…. Seriously, why does any BoD sit still for this kind of crap?
Because Dell’s BoD votes in the CEO and MDell has significant personal voting rights on the BoD, plus various friends on the Board.
the hell with the iphone and an expensive cell phone bill. I just ordered my 1st ipod touch!
Hear, hear. I’m making a move to the touch as well, but I’m waiting for iPod touch 5 with its dual core A5 processor and hopefully larger screen.
I was thinking the same, but word is it wont come out till sept and i couldnt wait. Bought one now, and will pass it on to relative when new one comes.
amazon is selling 8gb for $18 off plus a free cover and free ship
I wished that Apple would make iPod with camera (5mp at least) and so iPad.
I find this constant prediction of Android tablets overwhelming iPad sales very disturbing. People saying this sort of nonsense are trying to actually predict the future which just isn’t possible. Right now, there isn’t even an Android tablet growth trend that this conjecture can be based upon. With Apple’s enormous cash hoard and all those global retail stores there’s almost nothing that Apple can’t do to disrupt future Android tablet sales.
I also doubt that any Android vendors will be offering BOGO tablet strategy to boost sales because it would be far too costly for companies to do such a thing. I honestly don’t understand why Android is always given the nod as an omnipotent entity. Just because it’s freely distributed?
The reasons why Android is being pushed by the media is mainly because other companies than Apple can profit from it’s success. Apple’s devices are too perfect to grow an industry around. There is no money to be made fro iOS from the average Joe Blow. He happens to work at Dell, or IBM, or WalMart or somewhere else, just not at Apple. Think about it: Why was the original PC such a success, although there were many alternatives, and most of them worked much better than the PC? It was because there were thousands of stakeholders building a supporting industry AROUND the PC, in order to cover up it’s many shortcomings.
The alternatives were too good. They were beloved by the consumers, but not by the press. The press relies on ads by the supporting industry. That’s essentially who they work for. They don’t get no ads from Apple.
He didn’t see it coming because his eyes are too close together.
“I didn’t completely see that coming.”
It’s pathetic the way that he added the word ‘completely’ to that sentence to serve as some sort of fig leaf. It’s perfectly obvious that he didn’t have the slightest clue that tablets were going to take off, or else he would have done something about bringing a Dell tablet to market before Apple did.
The simple truth is that Michael Dell totally failed to see tablets coming, but expects people to listen to his pontifications about the future of tablets as though he has some sort of insight, while the facts show otherwise.
I don’t know why I have to bail Mikey out, but I do.
“The development of the Streak was first disclosed in June 2009 and in October 2009 it was known that the tablet was capable of making 3G phone calls.”
So, the Streak was being worked upon long before the first iPad was released. The Streak is a festering pile of shit and is more a large 5″ phone than a small tablet but …
I think Mikey is entitled to use the qualifying ‘completely’ in his “I didn’t completely see that coming” because he was working on a crapy iPad competitor months before the iPad was even announced.
Cut him an inch or two of slack.
I’m afraid that I must disagree there. Even with his revisionist version of what he predicted, he didn’t spot the big story and is still missing the bigger picture.
The trouble with Michael Dell is that he still believes that ill-conceived and poorly executed products are OK, so long as they are sold cheaply. That is old thinking and you can’t beat 21st century Apple in that way. It didn’t work when Dell launched the Adamo laptop which was supposed to be a MacBook air killer, neither did Dell make any headway against the iPod, which is a much smaller challenge compared to a tablet.
What Michael Dell completely failed to see coming was Apple executing a tablet so brilliantly that nobody could come close to equalling it and then being able to sell it at a price where nobody could possibly hope to match it and still make money.
The real genius about what Apple has done is that they have created and bated a very sophisticated trap, but it doesn’t look like a trap. On the face of it, the tablet market is the future and every major player wants to have a slice of the action.
However the downside is that Apple have created such a high quality product and priced it so aggressively that the usual tactic of making a low quality knock-off and selling it cheaply simply won’t work, because to match the iPad price, you have to cut corners that shouldn’t be cut. There is no chance of selling a tablet for more that the iPad, so an upper price limit has been established.
The cost of entering the tablet market is very high. The quality standard set by Apple is extremely high and there is minimal scope for selling a quality tablet cheaper than Apple and still making money on it. On top of that, any entrant will be up against all the other hopefuls, so they will end up drawn into a downward spiral, chasing ever diminishing margins, while Apple makes money on a colossal scale.
Apple have created a business that seems so attractive that few will be able to resist it, but the chances are that most who try to get into that market will lose spectacular amounts of money.
Michael Dell has not properly assessed the risks associated with trying to enter the tablet market or the odds against succeeding. It will end up as another drain on his already beleaguered company’s resources.
My prediction is that the only winner in the tablet market will be Apple. The losers will be those who try to launch abortive products. Those who have the sense to stay out of it will at least take comfort from not losing money in the effort.
I believe that the cost of failing in the tablet market could prove to be a fatal blow for some companies.
But Dell was trying to get a iPhone like tablet on the market before Apple did. He was shooting for a bigger iPod touch with phone capabilities. He wasn’t completely clueless.
He has the right to say, “I didn’t completely see that coming”.
@alanaudio – thanks for the very thoughtful post.
Uhh…I hate to break it to you, but persons familiar with the iPad and iPhone have stated that the iPad was in R&D before the iPhone, which would pre-date 2007.
No wonder he didn’t “see” the iPad coming…limited depth perception from marginal stereo vision.
How *does* old beady-eyes find his way out of the house?
Who gives a rat’s ass about what Michael Dull thinks? His company makes one of the worst PCs around. My barely three-year-old, mostly-Internet-surfing only Perspiron had a blue screen death a few months ago. In comparison, my seven-year-old iBook which had travelled to three continents, including a long stay in one of e most frigid parts of Europe, is still kicking. Never a Dull moment again in my life; NLT worth it.
Please I break out in hives whenever I see someone using a Dull notebook. The hinge is usually falling apart, it’s scruffy looking after about 2 months and for God’s sake anything made by Dull falls apart after about 6 months.
I know someone who bought two Dull notebooks (one for himself and one for his associate). They’re both sitting in a repair shop somewhere after the screen failed within six months. Try getting a Dull fixed in a non-existent Dull retail shop. I had a good laugh when I visited them lately – they’re both giving serious thought to getting a MacBook now. No doubt about it, once you go Dull you never go back.
Sadly, Apple is now worth only 11x Dell.
As for how Android got traction in the US, the greatest Android penetration has surprisingly been on Sprint and TMobile, and not Verizon. You have to remember that not only do you need a decent-enough device, but you also need low contract cost to reach the mass market. I think Sprint and TMo, being the weak sisters to AT&T and Verizon offered the cheapest plans, which ultimately drove Android adoption.
the real questions is this…
DOES HE KNOW HOW TO PROPERLY SALUTE?
I work Imani where I come in contact with tons of people everyday and I see very few Android phones and truckloads of iPhones. The community where I work has Verizon 3G and AT&T Edge (no 3G).
The fact that people all these years have bought AT&T iPhones on Edge rather than an Android on Verizon.
The few I know that switched from an iPhone to Android for 3G switched back in less than a month.
Android marketshare looks like a myth to me.
Damn auto correct. That post looks like I’m on a bender.
I love autocorrect 😉
Except when it’s “autoincorrect.” 🙂