Dell Quietly Leaves MP3 Market

An AD-Esque Sitcom writes "Dell has quietly retired from the portable player market. The Dell DJ Ditty — whose website is nothing more than an error now — was absent from Dell's catalogue, and the company was not offering any follow-up products, instead preferring to stick with PCs, printers, and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions. Dell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players — SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."

A Lesson for Late Comers?

Back in the day there was a phrase going around, which seemed to have great merit: Stick to your core competency. While not always good advice, for there were a few companies who diversified and prospered, it was often easy to find examples of where companies had utterly done themselves in by getting into product lines and services where they were out of their depth or the product/service really wasn't ever going to produce the return hoped for (during hard times these units are often the first closed because the accountants can readliy point them out as hemorraging cash.) Good for Dell, get out and put your mind on sorting out your battery woes and making better PC's (the past years models are a far cry from the quality of early Dell units.)

Microsoft, still willing to bet billions you have an iPod killer and wish to enter the digital music player market? of course, you love the challenge and it encourages those mean old euro dogs to request Windows with the media junk bundled the EU is currently spanking you for.

There will be an iPod killer

Companies that don't ever diversify don't always do well either. Dell's foray into the MP3 market turned out to be ill conceived, but as the great Homer put it "No matter how good you are at something, there's always about a million people better than you." Dell were on the bottom and gave up (probably a wise decision) but the Apple iPod is just one of an eventual million other better products. I see no reason why any company with enough money and ingenuity can't beat the iPod into second place, it's just a matter of time.

Re:

There will be an iPod killer

And monkeys might fly out my butt...hey...what the fuck...

Seriously though...all the supposed iPod killers thus far have been pitiful imitators.
The real iPod killer is likely to be either

A. something else from Apple, who spends

the problem is stock holders

I see no reason why any company with enough money and ingenuity can't beat the iPod into second place, it's just a matter of time.

The bedevelling problem is that public companies have these annoying stock holders who have little patience waiting for a product line to turn a profit. With Dell in particular, they've got razor-thin margins on EVERYTHING, and a bunch of stockholders screaming for profits to double year-after-year. Dell has far less time than a company like Microsoft where they've got huge margins on the OS and office suites, so they frequently win the 'cut off the air supply' waiting game, even when they don't have this 'ingenuity' thing you speak of.

Seth

Re:

Undoubtedly someone will eventually beat out the iPod, or other devices will become small and powerful enough to toss it into that chasm called obsolesence. However, as it stands today there's pretty much no way for the iPod to lose out, even with a consu

Simple Lesson Learned

Windoze Media is a loser. Hell, they gave those things and the music away and people did not use them. A friend of mine got one from his apartment complex as a spiff for not moving. The DRM'd music the RIAA tried to push on campuses was a flop even when

Hey

Atleast they didnt leave explosively. You gotta give them credit for that much.

Snakes on an MP3 Player

I guess Dell couldn't make use of all that Snakes on a Plane tie-in publicity, huh?

What, you didn't notice it? Small wonder, considering the character listening to the Dell MP3 player was known as iPod Girl [snakesonablog.com] until the last minute [snakesonablog.com].

Now they've lost so many opportunities...

to kill people in fiery MP3-player-related explosions.

They entered even more quietly.

I'd never even HEARD of the "DJ Ditty" until this morning's radio news mentioned that Dell had dropped it.

With PR like that - versus Apple's dancing silhouettes - it's no surprise it never sold.

microsoft.. why else?

ell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative. Of course they bailed on the market. Microsoft is about to enter it and drop a shitload of cash in an attempt to gain marketshare, just like they did with xbox. The most likely scenario is that they're going to initially cannibalize non-ipod sales.

not for me

...but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative.

iriver for life

Unless the next model I want to buy sucks, of course.

Zero margin product

Except for Apple, which uses it's excellent marketing to convince people that they need to wait in lines for hours to pay waaaay too much for their particular brand name, I can't believe that portable MP3 players are going to be cash cows for much longer. They're cheap, basic, simple electronic commodities at this point. Upload MP3's to them, press play, you have music. No big deal. Hell, Verisign just sent me a free one for downloading a 2 page white paper!

The excitement is already dying down.

Whose website is nothing more than an error now

Actually, they still make the player.

The website is down until they get some replacement batteries for the server.

Dell is cutting its losses, perhaps

In the wake of their battery recall and complaints about bad tech support (no surprise there) they are likely cutting their losses and allocating the capital spent on this player to other areas such as better advertising, and (hopefully) better tech support. A smart move on their part as it's too late to make a significant impact on this market now IMHO.

As for going quietly/gently, that is probably the right way to do it as share holders are scrutinizing their Dell stock and wondering whether or not they should be selling it. News that Dell has dropped their MP3 player, while certainly not a tragedy, may indicate either a weakness or a willingness to cut loose products that just aren't taking off. In effect they're playing it safe.

Haha

Farewell Dell! One market you can't take over by undercutting on price!

Don't let the door hit you on the ass!

P.S. I know I may be modded troll for this one, but its about time this happened. Maybe all of those "analysts" will stop spewing about "iPod-killers" whenever someone comes out with a cheaper mp3 player. They may be driven by price alone, but consumers aren't always (as we have seen here).

windows

left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."

iPod works with Windows as well.

What happened to Apple?

"...left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."

What happened to Apple? My iPod certainly works with Windows.

In the summary...

"...left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."

Granted, it would be much clearer as Windows Media-based, but I believe that's what the summary was alluding to.

Huh-what?

"...has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."

So, let's do some math here. Apple currently has, according to the most recent reports [pcworld.com], about a 75% market share in the portable music player market. If Apple has sold 50+ million iPods to date, that would give us a rough estimate of about 67 million portable music players sold, in total, from all companies who produce said products. 50M iPods, 17M "others."

Last quarter, Apple sold a little over 1M Mac computers, while it sold over 8M iPods. This is not a new trend, either: there are far less Mac owners than there are iPod owners in the world.

So, you're really trying to convince us that out of the 50M iPods that have been sold, there are more people who bought one of the 17M other players that use Windows than there are iPod users who use Windows?!

Did everyone already forget how a big a boon iTunes for Windows was for both Apple and iPod sales?

dude!

dude! you're exiting the market!

Dell's never done niches well

When you look at Dell's strengths, it's always been in mainstream products (PCs, laptops, and servers), significant add-ons to them that get used as revenue boosters (printers, low-end network hardware), and to a lesser extent displays and now TVs. Other branded add-ons like the Axim PDAs and their various MP3 players have never really been a hit, because they're the type of consumer electronics that get bought in person - and Dell doesn't do that. It wouldn't shock me at some point to see Dell drop the PDA line, too.

They've had enough hiccups in recent months that the pressure to execute is probably building. Dell has never been about "cool", or innovation. They've always been a supply chain-oriented company who makes money by taking a proven technology, building it faster and cheaper than everyone else, and taking advantage of every inventory trick in the book to keep the balance sheet clean. That works great for computers, but virtually nobody would ever buy a MP3 player over the web from them based on that alone. And Dell can't do sexy like Apple can. No wonder Michael Dell always sounds so bitter when he talks about Apple. He's about as much of an Anti-Jobs as any tech CEO could possibly be.

Not completely accurate

instead preferring to stick with PCs, printers, and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions.

I'm a Dell representative, and I'd like to say that this statement is not entirely true. We're also in the business of selling monitors, and we'll continue to kill people in fiery laptop-related explosions.

Uhm.. Apple has a Windows-based player... the iPod

Dell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players -- SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."

I'd say that Apple should be in that list of players who make a Windows-based portable audio device. The iPod works on Windows too.

Re:Explosions!

Of course we need these sorts of comments in the summaries! You vacuous, ill-educated buffoon! ...and when you say "flamebait", are you reffering to the comment or the laptop battery?