I couldn’t put it off any longer, after 6 years of (almost) faithful service my Dell Inspiron was definitely about to expire. Whilst in Austin I took time out to visit Fry’s Electronics (the world’s best electronics store in my opinion) and look at the shiny new laptops. Being at the cutting edge of the internet revolution I had it in my head that I would buy one of those new fangled Netbook thingies.
A quick review of specs and a few questions to the sales associate quickly helped me decide that Netbooks are not for me. I love the portability and long battery life and low’ish price. But the poor spec and inability to beef it up beyond 2GB memory meant my 100GB iTunes music and video library was not going to work to my complete satisfaction. I was also worried that since it was almost too small for my needs today, how long would it last given the speed of change taking place in the IT world. As I am not ready to live my life with everything hosted for me up in the cloud, I guess I am not right for a NetBook.
So, I got on with reviewing laptops. Of course, Dell was notable by their absence (keep in mind this is their home town). Most of the other main players were all lined up side-by-side (except Apple who insist their kit is sold in a different part of the store) and guess what? They were all exactly the same.
I know I am stating the obvious here but they were all X86 based machines with similar specs and the same O/S and similar warranties and so nothing stood out. Except the price!
When you get right down to it, the PC is now a total commodity product. All the major manufacturers have allowed their brands to drift and soften. Do HP (Invent)still stand for innovation? Nope, not in the X86 PC world they don’t. Lenovo? Err... I am not sure what they ever stood for. Sony? Toshiba? None of them seemed to stand for anything different (although Sony was mind bogglingly expensive but I couldn’t see why).
A few years ago when I joined Dell, they were still seen as the value leader. IBM was the safe pair of hands and HP was viewed as the technical leaders. Sony used to be the style folks of the PC world. All that is gone now and none of them are differentiated in any way that I could tell. I find this somewhat disappointing given what I and most of my friends do for a living.
With Dell’s value leadership gone they are actually disadvantaged now because I couldn’t see their machine to compare it aesthetically, and had I wanted to buy a Dell (which I did due to a sense of loyalty to the many of my friends that still work there), I would have had to wait several days, if not weeks for it to be delivered.
I bought an Acer. It was at least 30% cheaper than any comparable machine (admittedly it was being promo’d by Fry’s) and it looked better than anything else. I walked out with it there and then and have spent the last couple of weeks evangelizing it to anyone that is interested enough to listen.
Any my point is? Well, the big boys need to get their brand messages back on track if they are going to raise their game and compete with the far eastern manufacturers. And Dell need to get their retail presence sorted out quickly otherwise it will be a rapid downhill descent.
Footnote. I looked up the equivalent Dell machine to my Acer on www.dell.com and it was almost twice the price!
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