tallsails: Recent Comments

Comment on Some companies won't take your money

Steph Meslin-Weber — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 08:26:15 GMT

I heartily agree. It frustrates me no end when I get to a website that stocks my (sometimes rare) item, only to find out I can't quickly evaluate the offering against the others.

Sites that make me jump through hoops to buy from them end up ignored.

Comment on What the DELL is going on here?

ris — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 19:18:14 GMT

Dell's big problem is that they only have one sales channel. HP's wise move was selling through the supply chain champ, Walmart. I suggest that if HP didn't have their products at Walmart, Dell would still be #1.
The early stage startups I know are going with Dell

Comment on What the DELL is going on here?

TallSails — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:33:43 GMT

I agree with many of your points, but they are covered a lot already in the media - - I thought I would take a focus on my gut as to why Dell won't be around in thier current form in 5 years or so. There is no compelling reason for a customer to use them anymore. In fact, several dis-incentives.

Comment on What the DELL is going on here?

flounder — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:31:52 GMT

Good article. Don't agree on the M$ thing. Dell’s quality has degraded considerably over the past 5 years. The laptops are flimsy and fragile and the desktops are not reliable. I manage about 75 Dell laptops and 50 Dell desktops. My support guy has a dedicated location for the Dell repair tech. The standard support is horrible. I have the highest level support for laptops and desktops, but still have to sit through 20 minutes of the level 1 tech’s “book of questions” before I get to someone who knows what’s going on. On the other hand, their server quality is quality is good (not great) and the support is very good. The only reason I say this is I have the highest level support on the servers. I get in touch with an expert to start with and it gets fixed quickly. I feel sorry for anyone who has the low end support for a Dell server. Even though the servers are good, compared to HP, Sun, and IBM, Dell isn’t even in the same class.

Comment on What the DELL is going on here?

bob — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:31:02 GMT

You only do a fair job of describing Dell's problems. You don't touch on the fact that Wall Street hates them because they miss earnings estimates. You don't talk about the specifics of their bad service. You don't talk about their irrelevance in the corporate space becasue they are a one trick pony. You never mention Gartner's assessment of Dell. How about their terrible salesforce of 23 year old kids. Or their problems chosing the wrong horse (Intel) and not leaving the door open for AMD. How about the fact that Dell is not even best in industry anymore. Or that their CEO is terrible compared to HP's Mark Hurd. You could have done a lot better

Comment on SAP realizes they are out in the cold

Aaron — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 07:38:15 GMT

I think your analysis is correct, SAP knows they are in a losing position when it comes to a full software stack. But it will never ahppen, at least not by an American software company. Why? Because SAP AG is a German company. It's the largest software company in Europe, and European pride wouldn't allow it.

Would Mercedes or Airbus *ever* sell to an American corporation, whatever their situation?

Maybe Fujitsu-Siemens could acquire it -- Japan would like to make a comeback in computing, or some branch of the German goverment (DHL or T-Mobile?) with enough money, but there isn't a private European competitor with a big enough capitalization to do it.

Comment on Some things are clear

Eddie — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:20:40 GMT

Hi.

I am also a blogger, http://chicagrafo.blogspot.com, where I write mostly about things related to investment on AMD stock from the point of view of a technologist, and wanted to guest-book sign this post of yours that
I enjoyed about the trio of evil: Dell, Microsoft and Intel

I always write in a rush, but what suffers is the readibility, not the depth of the content itself.

By the way, I discovered this blog from a message in our rogue AMD investors message board:
http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=GN&action=m&board=1600774027&tid=amdinvestors&sid=1600774027&mid=12035
or
http://tinyurl.com/pg8um

(That message board has a funny history: We didn't like the new format for the official MB and moved in droves, see the action)

Comment on Some things are clear

John Cooper — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 08:25:05 GMT

Two comments. One is that I don't see the 2.0 craziness (I hesitate to call it a bubble just yet) being about services so much as socialness. Sure, under the hood it's all services, but what makes it viable is it's interconnected. RSS, and mashup technologies like it, are to web 2.0 as HTTP was to the dot-com bubble. Two, check out Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=sc_fe_l_2/?node=201590011&no=3435361) - a grid farm to match up with their S3 online storage. Maybe not so much horsepower, but 1/10 the cost of the sun grid.

Comment on SAP realizes they are out in the cold

PacificOwl — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 18:13:47 GMT

SAP needs a stack to survive independently. Successful application-only vendors are prime acquisition bait, even massive ones.

SAP claims to have a stack - NetWeaver. No one takes it seriously. The app server is a joke, XI (middleware) doesn't work, the portal is an add-on purchased from another company, the database is hacked MySQL, and the other components (identity management, OS) are either non-existant or not worth mentioning. Internally, they can't decide what platform to promote. The engineers want ABAP, marketing wants Java, the execs want .NET, and the customers want it to stay just the way it is. It's a mess. They've wrapped the whole thing under the meaningless term "ESA" to make it seem like there's a strategy.

Microsoft probably would have been the best option, and almost happened. That's over. Oracle would never happen due to anti-trust issues. Google - a "Web 2.0" company merging with a stodgy company whose technology is - at best - client/server? Doubtful.

The answer is - yup, you guessed it - IBM. It's a good fit. These guys are already tight partners. IBM has almost no application business on par with SAP, and SAP has nothing on par with IBM's infrastructure and eCommerce stack. It would give IBM a chance to sell boatloads of hardware to SAP's existing customer base - especially the companies running Sun and HP systems. It would give DB2 that needed shove to move it past Oracle. Consultant revenue would sky-rocket.

If SAP can't get customers to move to MySAP and the Netweaver stack - which they can't so far - the stock price will sag and IBM will grab them.

Comment on SAP realizes they are out in the cold

GreyGoose — Mon, 22 May 2006 09:29:00 GMT

If Oracle wants an OS, they will buy Red Hat, not Novell, too much litigation going around with Novell. Knowing Oracle, They would rather buy out than develop, if history is any indicator.