Can Dell and HP Keep Pace With An Asia-Centric PC World? 218
MojoKid writes "If you've paid any attention to the PC industry in the past few years, you're aware that things aren't as rosy as they used to be. After decades of annual growth, major manufacturers like HP and Dell have both either floated the idea of exiting the consumer space (HP) or gone private (Dell). Contrast that with steady growth at companies like Asus and Lenovo, and some analysts think the entire PC industry could move to Asia in the next few years. The ironic part of the observation is that in many ways, this has already happened. Asia-Pacific manufacturers are more focused on the consumer electronics market and better able to cope with low margins thanks to rapid adoption and huge potential customer bases. Apple has proven that high margin hardware can be extremely profitable, but none of the PC OEMs have been willing to risk the R&D costs or carry new products for a significant period of time while they adapt designs and improve market share."
Uh... that container ship sailed decades ago (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole market has belonged to Asia for a generation, and it's not going to change.
Re:Easily fixed (Score:1, Insightful)
15 years ago, I would've gladly bought made in USA. But now I avoid buying American products as a matter of principal. The way I see it, part of the money I pay gets added to the American military and "intelligence" budget so they can make more wars. Given the choice, I'd buy Chinese, Japanese, or Korean every time. When USA goes back to a peaceful nation and starts cooperating with other countries instead of competing with them, I'll start buying American again.
Windows 8 (Score:4, Insightful)
Up until 2011 Microsoft's strategy was to drive up PC marketshare but controlling the low end. Microsoft was very worried about initiatives like Sun/Oracle's Java Desktop to use thiner client distributed software and lower end machines. Their strategy was to push the price of PCs down low enough so that there weren't meaningful cost saving is just using server based architectures and local program execution was the norm. This is the same reason they focused so heavily on getting control of web technologies and tying them to Internet Explorer / Windows.
With the success of open Web Standards the move towards server based services is happening. This has required a strategy change. Windows 8 systems to work well require more expensive hardware. Microsoft is reintroducing margin back into the business and driving the cost of hardware up. They are willing now to sacrifice the low end so that the total experience on rich clients is much much better than on thinner architectures. Dell and HP sell mainly to corporations. Corporations are still years away from migrating to real Windows 8 hardware as a norm. I think this is short sighted on Dell/HP's part because in 5 years there is likely to be margin in the business. They've now gone through most of the lean years and just as the market is going to go back to being high profit they are exiting.
Once other companies get the experience in making powerful multi paradigm machines it will be hard for these companies to reenter the market. That being said I think Dell isn't existing the PC market, rather I think they going private so they can undergo a restructuring without having to provide regular public scrutiny.
It's because they're crap (Score:2, Insightful)
Rapid adoption, huge customer base? That isn't all (Score:5, Insightful)
Asia-Pacific manufacturers are more focused on the consumer electronics market and better able to cope with low margins thanks to rapid adoption and huge potential customer bases.
How about:
(1) Less greed,
(2) Being nimble
(3) Proper labor relations and management?
(4) The sense that, "We can beat them at their game?"
(5) Proud citizenry - Those Asians usually patronize Asian
made goods. You ask a Japanese what the best car is.
They'll tell you it's a Toyota! They then buy that!
Re:It's because they're crap (Score:3, Insightful)
Jesus Christ you must have a mountain of debt to still be in business.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Easily fixed (Score:3, Insightful)
You seem to be under the assumption that hurting the US economy will be translated into less war-mongering. You don't understand the US.
What will probably happen is:
US economy falters. Gas prices soar. Product prices soar.
Right-wing conservative hawks are elected in response. Half the country gets hopped up on jingoism, (which wouldn't take much).
Far more US military action world-wide.
You are much better off keeping the US fat and happy and waiting for more and more social-leaning leaders to be elected.
Re:Yes (Score:4, Insightful)
That ended up as something of a rant, but it's all true. I've been periodically trying to use Linux as my desktop since the late '90s, and it has always ALWAYS sucked. To the point where I abandoned the RedHat distribution in 2001 because of self-contradictory package dependencies. For a while, it was simply impossible to have a sane system at all. I dumped it. I've used Debian since then, but even they have run into that same sort of idiocy. They're all better about packages now, but the driver situation is definitely a disaster. Linux supports a truly impressive array of legacy hardware, but too often, something somewhere is broken and has to be manually tweaked in a config file somewhere. WiFi never EVER works right.
And yeah, sorry, the whole sound subsystem situation is just beyond retarded. I don't even understand that one. I've been coding to music for almost 20 years now (the sound isolation is absolutely essential in an office environment), and I know I'm far from unusual in that respect, so why oh why is Linux audio an utter trainwreck? It boggles the mind.
So I use a Windows desktop, and run XWin32 if I need access to Linux GUI apps, and PuTTY for everything else, and it takes something like ChromeOS to finally get close to a Linux Year of the Desktop.