Honestly, that’s pretty quick to learn that lesson. Huge corporations usually take way longer to figure that sort of thing out. Usually not until it’s too late.
I would speculate it means they either run on thinner margins than the companies that are all-in on AI, or they have less money available to throw around in the equipment hoarding wars. Or who knows, maybe someone with actual sense is heading the part of the company in charge of that decision. But I find the first two more likely.
It’s also very likely that they have a significant amount of corporate customers actively saying they won’t purchase AI-oriented hardware for security reasons, so they’re trying to spin the consumer angle publicly to try and grab the holdouts everyone else is obviously abandoning/ignoring as a side effect. That may be giving them too much credit, but despite just being okay at just about everything, they’re still one of the large OEMs that has survived.
This also makes sense. Dell is massive in the dataceneters. As a consultant I’ve worked with Dell hardware far more than anything else. I will say, just about every customer I’ve worked with is interested in AI, but they want to run their own models, not some half baked thing from Dell.
The were also the ones to pioneer what I think was called “JIT2” or something like that. Basically it was a “just in time” scenario where they only kept 2 hours worth of parts at the factory. They would literally have trucks of parts lined up in the parking lot to unload for that days build. It shaved a massive amount of debt off as they wouldn’t have to stockpile parts and could change much more rapidly. That’s probably what’s allowing them to pivot in this case.
Honestly, that’s pretty quick to learn that lesson. Huge corporations usually take way longer to figure that sort of thing out. Usually not until it’s too late.
I would speculate it means they either run on thinner margins than the companies that are all-in on AI, or they have less money available to throw around in the equipment hoarding wars. Or who knows, maybe someone with actual sense is heading the part of the company in charge of that decision. But I find the first two more likely.
It’s also very likely that they have a significant amount of corporate customers actively saying they won’t purchase AI-oriented hardware for security reasons, so they’re trying to spin the consumer angle publicly to try and grab the holdouts everyone else is obviously abandoning/ignoring as a side effect. That may be giving them too much credit, but despite just being okay at just about everything, they’re still one of the large OEMs that has survived.
This also makes sense. Dell is massive in the dataceneters. As a consultant I’ve worked with Dell hardware far more than anything else. I will say, just about every customer I’ve worked with is interested in AI, but they want to run their own models, not some half baked thing from Dell.
The were also the ones to pioneer what I think was called “JIT2” or something like that. Basically it was a “just in time” scenario where they only kept 2 hours worth of parts at the factory. They would literally have trucks of parts lined up in the parking lot to unload for that days build. It shaved a massive amount of debt off as they wouldn’t have to stockpile parts and could change much more rapidly. That’s probably what’s allowing them to pivot in this case.
Dell actually needs to sell computers to stay in business, unlike these big tech companies which make money just from existing.