Is Dell Dead?…Well Yes!

  • Posted by
  • on May 11th, 2008

Go pull up a chart of Apple and Dell the last 5 years. Nice paired trade.

Now I am not sure Apple can rise at the same pace it has and in a continued weak stock market, may fall a greater percentage from this point than Dell, but I know one thing….Dell is dead.

The best post on the subject in a while comes from the FAKE One himself…Fake Steve Jobs (REAL Dan Lyons) . Other than the REAL Steve Jobs, he knows more about Apple than anyone else :) .

Occassionally when I read FAKE Steve Jobs, it sounds exactly like Steve Jobs would sound. FAKE’s take on Dell is spot on (I am biased though due to my growing short position).

Here are my fave outakes from the article:

The other reason Dell won’t rebound is that the company is yoked to Microsoft. Vista has hurt them tremendously. Don’t doubt it. All of the PC makers know this and they are furious about it. But what can they do? They put their future in the hands of the Beastmaster. They figured they could deal with the Borg’s evil nature; they didn’t anticipate having to deal with the Borg’s incompetence. You may remember that ten years ago people were saying Apple should cave in and become a Windows shop too. You know why we didn’t? Because even ten years ago El Jobso recognized that Windows had become a hairball and foresaw the problems that the Borg was bound to have as the hairball got bigger and bigger and bigger. It was bound to collapse. It had to. It’s like using a Volkswagen car kit to build a space shuttle.

So instead of putting our future in the hands of the MicroTards we undertook the massive effort of creating a next-generation operating system of our own. A lot of people, including some very smart ones, said this was crazy. Especially for a company with 2% market share. They said we were suicidal, ridiculous, old-fashioned, hubristic, doomed. The effort cost us huge amounts of time and money and was far from a sure bet. But my feeling is if you don’t dare bet on yourself and your own people, you shouldn’t be in business. So we made the bet. And now it is paying off in spades — on Macs and iPhones and other devices which we have not yet announced but will restore a sense of childlike wonder to your lives, trust me.

Now as for Dell, well, you know what their big problem is? Dell doesn’t have me. Or anyone like me. Mostly because, let’s face it, there isn’t anyone else like me. I’m one of a kind. Sui generis, as the French say. What Dell has is Michael Dell. Don’t get me wrong. He’s a nice guy. And a smart guy. But he’s not a visionary. He’s not an artist. The stuff he’s good at — squeezing suppliers, screwing distributors — was very cool ten or fifteen years ago. Today? No big deal.

As FAKE Steve, REAL Dan quips…Dell is Gateway.

Time will tell, but I agree with him on his last line…if Dell is roadkill, there is nothing wrong with that, it’s a good thing.

Check out our interviews with him on Wallstrip .

The information in this blog post represents my own opinions and does not contain a recommendation for any particular security or investment. I or my affiliates may hold positions or other interests in securities mentioned in the Blog, please see my Disclaimer page for my full disclaimer.

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