Dell plans sale of non-core assets to reduce EMC buy debt Dell and EMC have agreed on the documentation to be put to the latter's shareholders at a forthcoming meeting that will vote on the merger of the two companies. And the document reveals that Dell plans to sell off some non-core businesses after the merger. The document in question is a Form S-4, one of the many regulatory …
Here is what dell needs to do to save themselves from declining.
1. Make sure that you design a AIO for a purpose that is designed as a hub for family to go on a computer and real life expertise.
2. Make Infinity edge 27 inch AIO
3. If people do not want low end computers or low end AIO's, do not make low end computers, put your efforts on 4K UHD machines with options of 1080p available.
4. Do not be in a business of offering 720p laptops and desktop AIO PC's anymore.
5. Offer ultrabooks with Nvidia pascal GPU's
6. Build better and high end machines that beats iMacs
7. Improve customer service
8. Offer Linux Mint on your PC's as a option in case Windows 10 is not a success
9. Make XPS AIO's competitive to iMac's with 4K UHD display, DDR4 SDRAM, Ultra-slim designs and iMac style Keyboard and trackpad.
10. Offer XPS 24 and XPS 27 AIO's as well
11. Offer Inspiron 24 4K Edition and Insprion 27 4K edition
12. Make XPS 27 have tap to power on a computer
Please build better computers with better customer service and iMac competiveness guarantee. Make sure that XPS 15 weight goes down to 3.7 ilbs with 4K UHD display and powerful GPU's.
Learn to innovate as soon as possible, and always supply computers with latest GPU's, not older GPU's.
I generally agree with much of what you are saying here. Those things 'may' increase Dell's market share in a shrinking pie. However that pie is still shrinking. None of this changes the fact that consumer refresh cycles have grown from 2-3 years to 5-6 years. My own PC is 6 years old. I've upgraded with more RAM and SSDs and it is actually faster now, with Windows 10, than it was when new with Windows 7. I even run multiple virtual machines at times for research and this old core i7 quad core CPU just keeps chuggin' along. I can get another 2 or 3 years out of this system and be content with the performance.
Refresh cycles at the OEMs themselves have gotten longer. HP used to give their employees a new laptop every 3 years. Now it is 4 years and I've heard of people having to go 5 years between refreshes. If the very people that build these laptops are doing that, then you can bet good money that other businesses are doing the exact same thing.
So what do these guys need to do? For one, they are going to have to move forward with planned obsolescence. The AIO's you mention can help on this by having everything soldered onto the MOBO. Making it difficult or impossible to upgrade AIOs and Laptops can help force those refresh cycles down. Microsoft, Apple, and perhaps Google need to develop new services, apps, peripheral devices, etc., that will drive up resource utilization and require new device ports. Legacy hardware support must end much sooner than it has in the past for Windows based devices. Apple has been doing this for years without too much complaining from their customers. MS can continue to give away their OS but they need to cut way back on how long they will support legacy hardware.
A lot of us techies will call bullsh!t on this but the majority of consumers won't. You may seem more techies building their own systems so they can stretch the refresh cycle but that will only have a marginal effect on PC sales.. Bottom line is that PC OEMs must fine a way to get that refresh cycle down or they are going to face continued commoditization of their product and eventual wide spread consolidation of their industry.
I wouldn't think that the primary reason Dell is buying/merging with EMC is to make inroads into consumer space, at all. The consumer-centered comments don't seem relevant in that light. That move seems to be geared to improving Dell's position in the enterprise services/storage market, which is a completely different market with completely different types of customers.
Or at least, one doesn't normally merge with a Enterprise level provider to make progress at the consumer space, but i'm a coward so what do I know?
So what are the Dell "non core" assets? They are already trying to sell Perot. Presumably their storage business wouldn't be core in this new Dell/EMC as it would just make for an, even more, complex storage portfolio than already exists at EMC.... Now PCs appear to be non-core, despite being 65% of revenues. So... Dell's "core" business = EMC? and they are going to try to sell as much of Dell as they can in order to buy it? Seems like it. Basically "we'll swap our business for EMC's business plus some amount of cash to EMC shareholders." Nothing from the current Dell would be strategic for the combined Dell/EMC.
Obviously Servers and maybe Networking will remain as core alongside EMC storage. Despite claims to the contrary keeping either one of these means the EMC / Cisco VCE relationship days are numbered. Yes EMC will continue to partner for Cisco networking the same as everyone else since they can't get away from that, but why leave money on the table for Cisco to take when they have their own competing products.
Yeah, I'm sure they will try to swap out UCS for Dell inside VBlock, but that means they are going to have to change the VBlock architecture. The whole idea behind VBlock was that customers were certainly going to buy Cisco network, almost certainly going to buy VMware (unless they use Hyper V), likely using or considering UCS, and EMC storage is fine. So why not take most of this stuff which you were going to buy anyway and pre-integrate it. Take Cisco out of that picture and it becomes a more difficult sell. Cisco and VMware made VCE. The rest of the stuff came with it. Not saying EMC/Dell/VCE won't do it, but that could be a tougher sell.
Dell's Force10 networking business could fall off the back of the Dell/EMC truck and no one would notice.
So basically they are just going to try to put Dell's commodity servers in VBlocks and that is Dell's contribution. Dell's servers certainly aren't core though. Basically zero IP value add in them.
It is an odd situation where the acquiring company is looking to replace most of their business with the acquired business. Although that is why Dell is going $67b in debt to buy EMC, leveraged buyout.
Granted a much tougher sell but that can be offset somewhat by shaping the pricing and go to market and since Cisco has minimal investment in VCE these days there's not much they can do about it. After all it wouldn't say much for Dell's enterprise credentials if longer term they were actively pushing Cisco servers over their own kit and why help Cisco's market share to the detriment of your own.
The writing was on the wall for this relationship well before the Dell buyout and this'll just accelerate things.
Interesting times ahead :-)
Agree, VCE was on its way out as soon as VMware acquired Nicira. They kind of had to go after Cisco though because Hyper V was almost at parity with them in server virtualization and less costly, so they needed to bring something new to the table or people would just add virtualization to their Microsoft EA and forget about VMware.
"why help Cisco's market share to the detriment of your own."
Because Cisco is Cisco. If they try to force the Dell angle down peoples' throats they might just drop VCE altogether and go buy Cisco's new hyperconverged system instead. If they keep the Cisco network though, it will probably be fine.
Yeah, it doesn't seem like it is being handled well at all. The EMC/VMware people are thinking "we're getting acquired by Dell, that can't be good... I'm out" and the Dell people are thinking, probably correctly, that EMC/VMware people are going to call the shots in this reverse acquisition, so they are probably looking to get out as well. It seems like the old Dell is basically being sold for parts in order to buy Michael Dell EMC and put the Dell name on it. Pretty crazy situation, I don't know if there has ever been an acquisition like it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
