Posted on 11/15/2005 1:18:38 PM PST by Panerai
Dell CFO Jim Schneider today said that his company is far behind Apple in the digital music market, adding that "we're obviously not competing very well." Schneider said "Apple has come out with a nice product and I think it's really turned their company around," when responding to analysts' questions regarding Dell's earnings. Dell last week said that third-quarter profit was down 28 percent, as sales to U.S. consumers dropped and business in the United Kingdom brought disappointment to the company, according to a report from Reuters. Dell also issued a sales forecast that reportedly left some analysts wondering if the company has lost the growth momentum it has had in recent years.
Michael Dell is an idiot and wannabe Steve Jobs.
He's driving Dell into the ground trying to compete with Apple on something so far out of Dell's market it's not even funny.
The electronis equivalent of Cabbage Patch Dolls. A fine product, but the market will saturate.
Isn't he one of the few Republicans in the tech world?
When iPods and other work-alikes hit near sturation point in a couple years(months?) they'll be giveaway items in cereal boxes and Apple will be back to where they were and Dell will still be here..........
That was radios.......
IMO Ipods suck anyway....Iriver and Rio beats it hands down.
Anyone with any experience with it? I'm thinking of putting the 1GB version on my birthday/Christmas wish list.
TS
I'll mostly be listening to 60-year-old podcasts, instead of using my Palm.
Which they ended up putting into cars?
I don't know enough about the topic to comment, but one thing piqued my interest: did the expansion into the United Kingdom involve onerous tarrifs in order to compete?
There's always a small market for pocket televisions. But iPods are the kind of thing that will be selling for $25 in a few years. They won't be as good as Apple's but they will be $25.
Another thing happening is the increasing buiness of DRM. I don't think iPods will survive if people really have to pay 99 cents for every song. I don't know how this will work out.
I have a son-in-law who just started out as a recording engineer. I am glad he got into spoken word instead of music. He does commercials, subtitles and other technical stuff. The music industry is the pits right now.
"Michael Dell is an idiot..."
If I could have one tenth his bank balance, I'd gladly be ten times the idiot.
Apple is paying a lot higher fees for music in europe in general and EU laws have complicated it.
Lesseehere ... with a miniscule product sample, I find:
- My iPod Shuffle works fine. I mean, it just plain works. Slick, light, tiny, does exactly what I want it to. No extranious cables, no fiddling. Took a geologic recording of the Indonesian tsunami last December to blow out the headphones, which were promptly replace in person for free at the local Apple store.
- My Dell Inspiron crapped out 6 times, 5 times the same way. 5 multi-day mailings to Dell for repair resulted in short-lived fixes, soon with repeat problems. A desperate plea for next-day on-site repair went unheeded by the Indian tech support, insisting I had to mail it back for repair THEN be _allowed_ to sign up for an on-site service plan. Eventually getting American tech support, he admitted the design was rediculous and suggested I not (wink wink) go to a very specific website for product repair details. I finally took it apart & put it back together (nothing detailed or complicated) myself and it worked ever since ... if you can call heavy, hot, and ill-tempered "working".
Awright, a minimal MP3 player vs. a full-featured laptop is not a fair comparison. Nonetheless, guess which manufacturer I'll buy from again ... and which I won't.
Yeah, that's why they went out of business.
Dell is a basic business guy who started selling build to order computers out of his dorm room. There's no rocket science there.
He genericized the business Jobs started and he thinks he's a genius for having done so. He's been badmouthing Apple since Jobs returned, and the whole while Apple has been doing better and better and Dell worse and worse.
I know you can put a jillion songs on a 20, 30 or 40 gig hard-drive player, but I've never felt the need to carry my entire music collection around in my pocket, plus hard-drive players scare me from a durability standpoint. I know there are probably a lot of folks who've had good success with them, and if that's the case more power to you, but in doing my homework before making this purchase I've seen enough horror stories about hard drive failures regardless of the manufacturer to make me think that it's not really idea to use a hard drive in something like a portable audio player that is going to take some abuse just in the normal course of use.
Biggest selling points to me for the Samsung are sound (it's AMAZING for something that tiny, only 2.39 inches high), the fact that it uses a AA battery, with 40 hours of life, instead of rechargeable (rechargeable units eventually stop recharging) and the fact that, if you create your own digital audio, it supports the Ogg Vorbis format which IMHO is immensely superior to MP3.
It will also play downloads from everything except iTunes.
What's a car?..........you mean those horseless carriages I see running around like june bugs in campfire?........
When "every song ever written by every artist ever known" is available on one chip and we have slots to implant the latest updates in our ear-pods, then this madness will stop.........
What do you expect from a company run by a hippie?
I have a close friend that's a Dell salesman with some big government account. They recently lost a big contract to IBM and my friend says that it's just a fact that IBM writes a better proposal...I told him that the reason that Dell probably couldn't write a good proposal is that the trouble starts at the top. Dell is a liberal hippie and just that. Like you said, he just picked up something someone else started and is living high off what he's been able to scrounge.
I didn't say Dell is a rocket scientist -- just rich. Rich would be nice -- I could hire rocket scientists if I wanted them.
Dell sucks, their crap is held together with bailing wire, and not to mention their support sucks too. AAPL still represents quality, and the growth they are seeing in their computers is astounding - wait until they put out the model with the intel chip next year....aapl will be a $100 next year, Dell will be $20...............end of story.
Certainly happened with the disc man right?
Although I won't suggest he's a friend, I do know Michael and he is anything but an idiot. Exactly how many billion dollar companies have you founded and run that gives you the standing to call him an idiot?
Oh, and Steve Jobs, who I also knew in the late 70s, has been called far worse than "idiot" for several years before stumbling onto the iPod. Now he's an undisputed genius.
Things change.
Michael didn't like the jukebox nor the pocket PC and resisted strongly getting into both markets. He let others speaking on behalf of other interests (the poor downtrodden stock holders missing out on this magical market) over ride his judgement.
I gather he's told several folks "I told you so you SOB!"
Do NOT count him or Dell out. Don't even count them out of these markets.
A more significant battle looks to be looming over HD DVD versus Blue Ray. Dell came out strongly in favor of BlueRay early on in an apparent attempt to influence the direction of the market. Bill Gates can't stand anyone being seen as driving industry directions and has suddenly decided to put Microsoft behind HD DVD, but without really thinking it through. HD DVD does not fit well with MS directions on DRM and several other technologies. I think Michael will come out on top on this one and that it will have a far greater impact on consumer electronics, particularly as it relates to PCs, than the iPod.
You'd be better off hiring folks to tell you the truth when you do stupid things like ignore your core market to chase a leader in another market.
True, my Creative Zen is awesome.
Flash memory isn't flawless. I've had two USB drives crap out on me. 64mb and 256mb. Sandisk was most honorable in replacing the second one. Blew my mind that they paid for the shipping to them - FedEx 2nd day
I'm not an apple worshipping and I think they have their place (for someone else)
but I think the ipod blows away everything else out there. I'm disappointed nothing else can come close for capacity and features, because I want a cheap competitor
Dell is not a consumer company, chasing a consumer company into a leading market is stupid.
The entirety of Dells success is customer focused technology solutions.
Dell has called Jobs an idiot since long before the iPod.
Further Jobs hardly stumbled onto anything (except perhaps the Apple I). Jobs returned Apple to it's strengths focusing on the consumer. Ever since he returned everything Apple's been doing has been copied by the industry.
They single handledly ignited the translucent colored products fad, and when that wore off the iPod was ready.
Dell has never started any fads, even their build-to-order idea was unoriginal and they aren't the only BTO game in town at that.
Dell is a follower not a leader.
I think so, but all that the ipod money goes to Dems....
Thanks for the recommend. It looks superior, indeed, and the reviews on Amazon and elsewhere confirm your opinion. (It's funny how markets, marketing and fads work, though.) Will check it out.
I would guess again ... I am one of the chip designers for the ipod ... we have a LOT of nifty new stuff coming up that will keep the product viable for many years
Those of you who are into creating your own digital audio and don't already know about this, you need to check out the Ogg Vorbis format for music. I highly recommend it.
If I was given an iPod, I'd eBay it right quick and get me another Dell DJ.
The iPods are already evolving into different species. Apple's dominance has been great for them, but it won't last.
I like the easy of use of the ipod.. If my wife can use it... then it was designed correctly.
as for other apple offerings.. I'm not that impressed.
Eighteen months dealing with Dell "tech support" and countless hours on the phone before they finally admitted that my laptop kept freezing because of a faulty hard drive. This experience has made a lifetime Machead out of me. We are now a three Powerbook and one I-Book family. Dell had my business and they threw it away.
I have a SanDisk mp3 player -- 512 memory is sufficient for my needs.
Great little toy. User friendly. Inexpensive.
I wear it when running. Very reliable and easy to operate even in the dark. Only criticism is about the armband. The armband carrier is clear plastic and I doubt it will outlive the player.
Does Apple outsource it's customer support to India?
Everybody, except for me and my monkey, has an opinion, knows the future, don't know the difference between "its" and "it's".
Apple doesn't have customer support because their products don't require it. < / iZombie >
Apple was hardly chasing SONY into that market. Rio Maybe, you could make a case, but Sony was basically not even playing the mp3 player market. That is why Apple won it. The first company with an A-Z simple solution for getting mp3s playing them at home and playing them on the go was Apple, and they are still the quickest way to do it.
Frankly OS X is poised to take on Windows anyway, the numbers of folks switching is rising and rising.
It is because Apple bundles the OS with the hardware that they are able to deliver solutions LIKE the iPod, it is also why when the PC industry got hit after the bubble they kept right on making profits.
It wasn't too late for clones it was a dumb idea; IBM NO LONGER SELLS PCS BECAUSE THERE IS NO MONEY IN IT. Tell me who won that battle?
NeXT tried to go all software and it bankrupted them.
Apple's customer support is highly rated by consumers. FWIW I haven't needed to call em in like 8 years though, plus you can stop into any Apple store and get product support for free from an Apple Genius.
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