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back to article Cloud will NOT eat the tech industry, Michael Dell declares

Michael Dell shrugged off the threat from the public cloud this morning, suggesting that many users will eventually realise running a server on Amazon is a lot more expensive than actually owning one. The Dell Technologies chairman, speaking on stage at the opening of the Canalys Channels Forum EMEA, said the current hype …

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  1. Your alien overlord - fear me

    Where does Dell get his figures from?

    Just did a price quote for a small business to get them on Azure - free for 3 years with Microsoft's sign up for a trail and get credit to your account. Only downside is you need reliable fast intenet connection which they don't have (and yes, it's fibre but never gets to advertised speeds except at night when everyone's gone home!!!).

    0 6 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shrinky

    Companies like HPE (shrinking itself to growth) and IBM (hollowing itself out for 'shareholder value') are any better? The Dell model may be the successful one in the long run as the others are beholden to the Wall St. hype cycle which distorts company behavior in destructive ways. As to the cloud, it's good, but cloud isn't always only remote. Hybrid cloud and converged/hyperconverged is the best risk-averse strategy for many companies at the present.

    3 1 Reply
  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Some Truth

    Well, "the cloud" is over-hyped.

    Remember "thin clients," anyone? Zero Clients? Mainframe terminals?

    It was the rise of the IBM PC that fractured the Priesthood of Data Processing.

    When web-based applications came along, we thought we'd just need browsers.

    Now those browsers have to process a lot of Javascript......

    For absurdity, go to the internet archive, and play a DOS-based game. In your browser...

    3 1 Reply
    1. Naselus
      Reply Icon

      Re: Some Truth

      Yeah, much as I hate Dell's shitty build quality and awful support, he's not wrong about this - cloud's more expensive in many cases (save very small businesses who can't afford capex, and dev houses who intermittently need a lot of compute for a very short period) and being publicly traded leads to idiotic short-term C-suite decisions to support the share price at the expense of long-term strategy.

      4 1 Reply
      1. mukadi
        Reply Icon

        Re: Some Truth

        I worked on an AWS project for a startup and the monthly bill from Amazon was around $5000!!!

        Multiply that by 12 and you understand that Dell is right...

        With that said I hate Dell crappy boxes and this name always reminds me the PC capacitors disaster of the last decade when Dell knowingly built PCs with faulty capacitors and I was one of their victims.. Since then I never bought a Dell and I will never buy one in the future.

        I am currently working on Azure projects but for my personal computing needs (HPC) I have a dual-socket Xeon sporting 22 cores each... That's 44 cores/ 88 threads and the cost was $16K - Nothing comparable to what I would be paying on AWS per year!!!

        0 0 Reply
    2. Dan Wilkie
      Reply Icon

      Re: Some Truth

      I've worked for many places where all users who don't need to travel for their work only have thin clients, and those that do access 90% of their stuff through Citrix/VDS over the internet.

      I feel like I've completely missed the point you're trying to make though :\

      0 0 Reply
  4. cduance

    I imagine

    that the most convenient part of the 'cloud' is monthly payments so why not sell servers with a subscription. You get them day 1 and get to split the payments over 2 or 3 years. You get on site hardware and a support agreement in place. Would stop people looking at a 5k server and going oooh that's a lot to go out at once...

    0 0 Reply
    1. Naselus
      Reply Icon

      Re: I imagine

      Many vendors and hardware manufacturers do this already. HP have a 'finance' option which does pretty much exactly what you're saying.

      0 0 Reply
  5. ParasiteParty

    Agree with Mr Dell.

    Cloud is over-rated. There *are* real places for it, like cloud-hosted email, of course web sites and public facing web applications, but for privately hosted data, cloud does not make sense on any level that I can see other than *convenience*.

    Addressing this benefit directly: since when was convenience the pinnacle of achievement? How about security, privacy, and so on?

    0 0 Reply

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