This is a very interesting article on what Dell and HP are planning for the future. Here is Dells vision which seems woefully lacking in the innovation department:
Dell Chairman and founder Michael Dell, speaking at a San Diego technology conference, emphasized selling new consumer devices, such as state of the art computer monitors and media PCs designed to handle television, music and photos.
This stuff can be done with almost any PC you can buy nowadays. You can do this with a cheapo Lenovo or an E-Machines or whatever. You certainly do not need a state of the art PC to watch TV, listen to music, or see photos. Hell you can do all that crap with an Ipod with a TV connected to it.
He described the increased productivity, including his own, from workers using multiple computing screens.
About the only people that I know that uses multiple screens at the same time are stock traders. I assume that some people can be productive with multiple screens but the vast majority of business workers probably won't need them. Hell they may not even have desk space for multiple screens. (I sure don't)
Dell also said that video game enthusiasts, rather than scientists, proved to be the largest customer segment for some of its more powerful machines - a nod to the unpredictability of fast moving technology markets -- a trend he expects will continue as consumers find new uses for their machines.
This is one of the most high margin PC buying groups but it is also one of the most fickle. I have talked to some PC gamers and they say the Dell Gamer PCs are pieces of crap. Most of the gamers I know either buy a barebones system and then soup them up with stuff from Newegg or just build their own. I guess there are gamers that buy Dell PCs exclusively but they probably will only buy the one machine and then switch out the parts when they become obsolete. For instance a gamer won't buy a whole new Dell when the next generation of kick-assed graphics cards come out. He would just buy a new graphics card.
Also the next generation of consoles have very comparable specs to all but the most high end gaming PCs. Gone are the days where the PC smashes the PS2 in graphics quality. Some people are saying that the PS3/Xbox360/Wii might set back PC gaming for years. Why do you need a badassed rig when you can just plunk down $500 for a console that plays pretty much the same games. Plus, the games I play that aren't console games (Civ4, Victoria, and soon to be Europa Universialis 2) can still be played even on my aging rig.
No comments:
Post a Comment