So, uh, wasn’t Dell supposed to be working on a cellphone?
Well, that was the scuttlebutt. But Dell has failed to show at recent mobile trade shows. Shaw Wu, an analyst at Kaufman Bros., asserts in a research note today that the company’s first attempt was basically rejected by the carriers as too, well, Dell-like.
There was a time when the geeks who keep a company’s tech systems running could get by without knowing the finer details of corporate strategy. Well, those days are over. This downturn could mean the end of the sequestered CIO.
Wednesday would be a really bad day for Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd to break his winning streak. Central bankers around the globe are sweatily trying to revive faltering banks. Luckily, Hewlett-Packard has a man at the top now who could be called Maalox in human form.
J.P. Morgan analyst Mark Moskowitz has a grim outlook for 2009 PC sales: He expects world-wide shipments to drop 13.5 percent this year, down from his previous forecast for a decline of 3.7 percent. Accordingly, this morning he cut his rating on Dell to Underweight from Neutral, chopping his price target to $8.50 from $12.
Dell called a bunch of reporters to a room at the Palms hotel in Las Vegas and gave them a sneak peek at a widely rumored laptop called Adamo. It was literally just a peek; the stylish, thin notebook PC was held up briefly by a stylish, thin fashion model who goes by the single name Hollis. A small mob of photographers was allowed to snap away for a minute or two, and then the Adamo was hustled out of the room.
A couple years ago, right around the time Dell’s exploding laptop batteries were getting a fair amount of media attention, I had breakfast in San Francisco with a senior Dell executive. He was seriously annoyed by all the focus on Dell, even though his company wasn’t the only one with the spontaneous combustion problem caused by Sony’s batteries.
All the speculation about Dell’s upcoming Adamo computer appears somewhat comical once you learn that the company’s confirmation of the product has been sitting in plain sight. Last week, I spotted what looked like a blog post from luxury magazine UptownLife, discussing a future laptop from Dell possibly thinner than Apple’s MacBook Air.
Michael Dell gets a lot of the credit for pioneering the direct sale of PCs to the public. The reality is that there is a legion of now long-forgotten mail order entrepreneurs who came along earlier. He just did it better than all the rest.
Dell shares are down today after a disappointing Black Friday weekend at Best Buy stores. A survey of 35 PC experts indicates that salespeople prefer HP to Dell by a margin of 5 to 1, and that Dell is the only brand at Best Buy with negative comments–pointing to potential quality issues.
Dell hit a new 52-week low today, $8.72, before closing down 51 cents, or five percent, at $9.30, after last night reporting sales that missed estimates by a billion dollars and calling the global IT demand outlook “challenging.” The stock was downgraded from “Outperform” to “Market Perform” today by Friedman Billings.
But, is there cause for hope?
Numbers aren’t really working out that well for Dell. One of Its rivals scored points today with impressive preliminary results, but–of more significance–there are ominous sounds coming from Intel’s direction regarding the rest of this year and the whole of next year. Cautionary pre-earnings notes took their toll this morning as well, and drove the numbers down.
One of the hottest technologies in Silicon Valley is also one of the simplest. The online service from Web start-up Twitter Inc. prompts users to do one thing: answer the question, “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less.
The Internet attack took Yahoo engineers by surprise. It came so fast and with such intensity that Yahoo, then the Web’s second most-popular destination, was knocked offline for about three hours.
That was on the morning of Feb. 7, 2000. A few months later, 15-year-old Michael Calce was watching “Goodfellas” at a friend’s house in the suburbs of Montreal when he got a 3 a.m. call on his cellphone.
In my keynote at Web 2.0 Expo New York, I made the comment that, cool as Dell Ideastorm is, the fundamental supply-chain approach behind dell.com is actually a better example of how Web 2.0 applies to the enterprise.
Yesterday afternoon, I posted a list of how some of the most prominent stocks fared in Wednesday’s mammoth selloff.
Given today’s equally dramatic rally, I thought the list deserved an update–I’ve added just one stock, Microsoft (MSFT), which I inexplicably forgot to include yesterday.
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