Dell To Sell Its Computer Factories 249
Anti-Globalism sends us to a Wall Street Journal for a report that Dell plans to sell its factories in an effort to revamp its production model. Quoting:
"Dell's plants are still regarded as efficient at churning out desktop PCs. But within the industry, company-owned factories aren't considered the least expensive way to produce laptops, which have been the main driver of growth lately and are complex and labor-intensive to assemble. Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. years ago shifted to contract manufacturers -- companies that provide production services to others -- to build their portable computers. H-P builds "less than half" of its PCs in facilities it owns, wrote Tony Prophet, H-P's senior vice president for PC supply chain, in an e-mail. Contract manufacturers can generally produce computers more cheaply because their entire operations are narrowly focused on finding efficiencies in manufacturing, as opposed to large firms like Dell, which must also balance marketing and other considerations."
Made in China (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Made in China (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens when the exploding cost of oil makes it too expensive to ship computers back and fourth from china? Could we see a grand resurgence of electronic manufacturing jobs in North America? Perhaps Mexico will become the manufacturing powerhouse for us that china is now.
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Re:Made in China (Score:5, Informative)
It takes more fuel to truck something from LA to Chicago than it does to ship it from China to LA. No doubt trains improve on trucks quite a bit, but fuel costs aren't particularly onerous for objects that regularly retail for $100/pound (maybe worry about it when you see bananas go for $5 a pound instead of $0.70).
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Re:Made in China (Score:4, Informative)
What happens when the exploding cost of oil makes it too expensive to ship computers back and fourth from china? Could we see a grand resurgence of electronic manufacturing jobs in North America? Perhaps Mexico will become the manufacturing powerhouse for us that china is now.
Well, except most of the components already come from Asia somewhere, and most computers aren't put in 10lbs steel cases anymore. The future is likely to be laptops (already past 50% I think?), netbooks (Atom has been selling wildly past expectations) and nettops which are "fast enough" desktops for most people. All of these are compact and light, if we couldn't afford to ship those you wouldn't be able to ship most household gadgets. And even if all of that wasn't true you're looking at cheap cases and assembly building, not high-tech industry. And even if that wasn't true, I think the increased wages means you'd see more standardization and robot assembly, so job for some automation engineers but not many jobs. The days when you had half a dozen expansion cards to get RAID/sound/network/USB/firewire/SATA/eSATA are long over. The new Atom boards even have the processor soldered on. Most parts of the computer are so cheap, you just want it assembled with a minimum of overhead - a higher tier standard computer will often give you the upgrade you wanted *and* overall be a better computer for the same price as making a custom build.
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That's nothing new though. I realise not everybody was on the ITX scene before intel landed its fat ass squarely 50km in the wrong direction, but soldered CPUs are nothing new.
I think all the C3, C7, Geode, and now Nano boards have the CPU soldered. They've always had to support pretty much everything, sometimes in tiny packages where everything is in just two parts (see: VX700/VX800).
PicoITX is an interesting standard, especially if it can be brought down in price or start shipping with the Nano. NanoITX w
Re:Made in China (Score:4, Insightful)
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HP seems to agree with you.
I live in Brazil, and the last HP notebook I've bought was built here in Brazil by Foxconn (if I recall, I don't have it here with me).
Making stuff in China is much cheaper than here in Brazil, but with you factor in transportation, import taxes etc, sometimes it is cheaper to build it somewhere else, even if you are still using contractors.
Re:Made in China (Score:4, Informative)
container ships run on "bunker" fuel which is basically the nastiest cheapest stuff that will burn. They're dirty cheap to operate and they're typically subsidized by host country to boot. So the Chinese government, Korean government, etc make it cheaper in the interest of trade.
Frankly, I'm surprised Dell has been assembling computers in the US for this long. Don't tell me they "build" them here that's a load of nonsense. The parts have been made in China and Taiwan for ages it's just the final assembly that was happening in the US. In fact, the shipping cost difference is likely ZERO because all the parts were coming from Asia anyway.
Anyway, Dell has been doing a lot of cost cutting recently. They've outsourced their IT to India and now they're moving all of their assembly to China.
The worst part is that Dell doesn't even offer good prices anymore. I'm seeing better prices from small US companies with more flexibility then anything out of dell.
So to hell with them. They'll ride on their names for a few years and then they'll be another dried out company like the rest of them.
Not likely (Score:2)
My guess is that in the next year or so, America's consumption will drop by 10% or more. The good news is that if EU forces China to keep to their word concerning tariffs and freeing their yuan (it is based on a fake purse), then the dollar will p
Re:Made in China (Score:4, Interesting)
They said that for things like flowers for florists, that now typically get flown in from Chile, are right on the edge of being unfeasible because of the high cost of oil. Also, the US steel industry has gotten a boost since steel is so heavy.
For something like computers, or ipods, on the other hand, which have such a high value/weight ratio, it will be a long time before shipping is not cost effective.
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What happens when the exploding cost of oil makes it too expensive to ship computers back and fourth from china? Could we see a grand resurgence of electronic manufacturing jobs in North America? Perhaps Mexico will become the manufacturing powerhouse for us that china is now.
The WSJ article speculates that the plants would continue to produce parts for Dell, but that Dell would sell the plants and outsource their manufacturing to the new owners of the plants.
Basically, Dell wants to say "We're tired of this headache, somebody come in and run this for us for less money than we spend ourselves."
In this event, there is no change of trnasportation routes, just who hires the managers and employees at the factories.
Easier than that (Score:2)
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Having worked there (briefly), I was under the impression that the laptops were already being farmed out to Flextronics and Foxconn, and Dell staff only did minor customizations to the pre-assembled product (accessories, upgrades etc).
The way I see it, either this press release is some weird CYA bullshit, or Dell lied to its employees about its manufacturing processes (but what for?). Either way, something's fishy.
Quality control (Score:5, Interesting)
While it may be cheaper to outsource production of your primary product, quality control might not be as good.
Besides, it seems kinda wrong that a company that manufactures computers is outsourcing manufacturing of computers.
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You make a point, but you've missed the larger picture. I am a Dell employee and I can tell you the future of the company is not manufacturing PCs or notebooks, but rather offering services-after-the sale for the machines built by contract manufacturers.
Dell also outsourced it's support (Score:4, Interesting)
They don't provide the services directly, they don't manufacture the hardware directly. They are now simply a middle man hoping to cream off some cash.
Can't think of a good reason to buy directly from them now.
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Here, their business support is provided by Unisys.
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That's perfectly fine. In the longer term though, don't be surprised when the contract manufacturers take over the aftersales business as well.
Retreats upwards in the foodchain, to the more 'profitable' or 'brand value' segments is a standard for corporations who've gotten too heavy to compete. Ultimately they tend to get bought by their more nimble competition.
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Wow, never would've thought that Dell would be in the same business as RedHat...(that would be "we sell services" model).
At least in the case of RedHat, the underlying software is better.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sounds like Dell really are embracing Linux. They're moving their manufacturing into a specialised daemon, doing one thing and doing it well.
It was inevitable, since they've been treating their components as files for years (they are kept in a "notebook" afterall) :P
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Loss of control (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't this eventually lead to the contract manufacturer refusing to build Dell's designs [and does Dell even design their own laptops?] because the designs don't fit into the manufacturer's efficiency models?
Somehow this seems like it will eventually turn Dell into a company just reselling whatever laptop designs/models the manufacturer can make the most efficiently.
As for Dell's intellectual property? I'm sure it can be protected by their manufacturer, provided they sign a long-term deal and help the local party boss with whatever his needs are.
Core Competence (Score:3, Interesting)
Every company needs to identify its core competence, and never, ever give that up or outsource it. On the flip side, every company should seriously consider outsourcing anything that isn't part of their core competence.
If you are a custom-software company, you had better be able to deliver custom software. You hire the programmers, you have good quality equipment for them to use, you have a good marketing team to generate demand for your programming team, etc.
But anything not directly related to custom sof
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"American" companies like Nike and Levi's don't actually do anything except decide which Chinese products to buy, then import and market them (at huge markups of course). Guess Dell's just getting with the times.
But yeah, it does seem kinda wrong. Like, what what value are we really adding here.
Price, the only consideration? (Score:2)
Re:Price, the only consideration? (Score:4, Insightful)
Efficiencies like employing 12 year olds to work 16 hour days in the factory, and other practices that are difficult for a US brand-name company to get away with without distancing themselves through outsourcing.
Re:Price, the only consideration? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Price, the only consideration? (Score:5, Funny)
This of course applies to 3-12 year olds also!
Why, I see you are quoting from the Divine Book of Anarcho-Capitalist Boundless Universe-Devouring Avarice. And it says within: "You shallt not stop until 16 hour work day at a mining facility is granted for every of ye 3 year olds, as is their right, for it is ordained by our Lord Mammon that the only conceivable in a pious land alternative be ... brothels and street panhandling! So sayeth we! Verily!"
Why, if it weren't for the enterprising Priests of Limitless Greed, we would all be ruined by our childhoods of prostitution, having never tasted the glorious privilege of back-destroying labor at a ripe age of 6. What would we ever do without our Magnanimous Capitalist Benefactors of Trickle Down Economy?!
Re:Price, the only consideration? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is simply incompetence, or idiocy, I'm not sure which...
I work for a very large food company that has about 40-50 manufacturing facilities worldwide. These facilities make almost all of our products. We make millions upon millions of items every day... in the facility I work in, we make something like 1.5 million items a day, just by ourselves. In an average grocery store, we manufacture around 500 distinct products, to say nothing of the variety of goods we provide to food service establishments such as hospitals, restaurants, hotels, military bases, etc.
In the current bad economic climate, our stock price is rising rapidly. Why? Analysts attribute it to our ability to find efficiencies in manufacturing and operations. We don't look at finding efficiencies as an impossible burden to be outsourced to others; we instead look at it as an opportunity to increase profits without having to raise costs on consumers (which is especially important in this economic climate). And we've gotten quite good at it over the years, despite the fact that, perhaps even more than Dell, we do spend a lot of time and energy on marketing, sales, finance, coupons, and everything else. I can guarantee you that you see a lot more of our commercials each year than Dell's.
So I think Dell is really being incompetent here. Instead of looking for savings and learning to make its operations efficient, it is going for the quick fix of contracting out. But my guess is that it will contract out to a number of different facilities throughout the nation or world, and while each of those facilities will be good at focusing on itself, they will not have the advantage of seeing learnings from ALL the facilities across the organization, and they will miss things. I know our plants keep tabs on each other and call each other all the time to see how some project or other went. Typically one plant will take the plunge on some experimental idea, and the rest will be watching to see if it works out, which is a lot better than siloed contract plants potentially trying the same failed idea at each facility due to lack of communication. Had Dell kept manufacturing, it would have had the advantage of seeing the whole organization, and they could potentially have saved more in the long run by manufacturing everything themselves, but instead they are taking the incompetent way out. Frankly, I'm glad I work for a company with better leadership than them.
Re:Price, the only consideration? (Score:4, Insightful)
Last I checked, Two Scoops was still in production after ten years, and the margins terrible. In contrast, computer equipment moves rapidly. This is most apparent in chip fabrication, but also in final computer assembly. The fact is, you can't spend the time wringing out production efficiencies in a product with a 3 year life span. Especially when assembly is such a small part of the cost anyways, it just doesn't make sense to focus on that rather than reducing part costs.
Coase's theorem is the relevant economic concept, about when firms choose to hire employees (do it themselves) versus go to the market. And there are ton of contract manufacturers driving prices down. By letting these guys focus on the cost of operating their plants (which plenty run several of), Dell can focus on financing and marketing and pricing features you and I want, rather than pursue slim improvements in margins that are the staple of commodity manufacturing.
The truth is, Dell pursued production too much, at the expense of margins. [marketwatch.com] By selling off the factories, they can move the balance between share of sales and prices much faster. Just order less and let the contract manufacturer deal with what to do with the downtime.
Agree (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen the same in the semiconductor industry. I was automating Asia during the 80's and 90's. They were quietly spending billions.
I always wondered why the American companies in the US for the most part, couldn't get their act together on production efficiencies. They opted to send manufacturing overseas.
While I understand the overhead costs here were higher, I feel it was so they could "scale down" easier.
For me, it was ok while we were building the supporting manufacturing equipment here, but how lo
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Different markets, different companies, different efficiencies.
As competent laptops near the two figure mark in dollars, manufacturing is increasingly turning out commodity items. That means margins get small. That's what killed the PDA industry: it wasn't convergence per se. Convergence makes sense for some users and not others, but it makes sense for all producers. Rather than adapting to selling $49 PDAs, they escaped into the highly controlled and artificial world of mobile phone sales.
The problem
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Well, it works for Apple, and they seem to be successful (and popular!). Why not Dell?
You're right of course, such things will eventually come back and hurt the company long term (I mean, their contractors are effectively becoming their competition in their local markets---think of Lenovo---unless you're into corp IT consulting, nobody even hears ``IBM'' these days---they seem to be doing ok financially though).
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The reason this is bad for Dell is that Dell's core business model is providing machines with a custom configuration, not 3 different configs and screw you if you want something different. I'm not sure how much this will hurt them at the consumer level, but most of Dell's business is large orders for offices. Businesses are not going to like it if a sales manager has to say 'we can't do that anymore'.
Too Many Chiefs (Score:2, Insightful)
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That entire piece was nothing but PR spin so they can excuse the outsourcing to 3rd world countries to make their computers. Other places under other people's control, where they don't have to pay a decent wage, have a decent work environment, or be environmentally friendly.
Right now Dell has to do marketing to sell it's computers (duh).
It will still have to do the vary same marketing of it's computers after it outsources its manufacturing (duh).
Meanwhile, dell currently owns the factory. The factory does
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They're not "unimportant" they're being efficientized. Which means neglected except in market where the customer explicitly refuses to buy if they're not included/is willing to pay extra for them.
Apple (Score:2, Insightful)
While Dell and HP try to make cheap computers that aren't broken, Aplle will continue to make good computers that aren't cheap. Apple has been gaining marketshare from these guys steadily for a long time now.
Re:Apple (Score:5, Informative)
All of Apple's parts are Foxconn, except the intel processors, and $somebody's hard drives.
Congratulations, you have parts made from the bottom-of-the-barrel of the shittiest components maker, Foxconn. Nobody would touch that with a 10-foot poll when they have Gigabyte.
Apple cuts its costs to make a profit, too. Or you thought an iMac really costs 1000$ to make?
Absolutely right (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely right. No one who has built computers for any length of time feels comfortable putting a Foxconn board in over the alternatives. Not saying a Gigabyte board or an Asus board will never go bad (I've had them go out on me before), but just hop over to newegg, search for motherboards, filter to those manufactured by foxconn, and just take a look at the number of stars (or eggs) they get. Then go in and look at the comments, and take a look at how many have died within a few months, or were just DOA.
I bet Apple daily ships boards back to Foxconn by the truckload as they show up dead on arrival and fail QA, but you've got to know that a lot of those 1-3 months of life boards are getting through. Have fun with Apple products!
And as a side note, if Apple products are so awesome, explain the whole iPod battery fiasco a few years back where iPod batteries were all dying shortly after the warranty, and Apple was just telling everyone to go buy a new iPod. Or go look at all the forums full of people complaining about how their iPod shuffle just randomly bricked itself one day (orange and green flashing light issue), sometimes due to the new version of iTunes, and sometimes just because. And how Apple's solution again was to tell everyone to go buy a new Shuffle. I had one of those, and I basically said, "Screw the crappy, short lived Apple products with no support, I'm buying a Zune." As All State might say, "I was NOT in good hands", and I was not about to be taken by Apple again.
pot kettle black (Score:4, Interesting)
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if Apple products are NOT so awesome, tell me why their customer satisfaction ratings simply blow away all others.
OMG is that the macbook air??!? I so want it!!! It's so gorgeous!!! Mac is so pretty!!
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So..... if Apple products are NOT so awesome, tell me why their customer satisfaction ratings simply blow away all others.
Brilliant marketing, and they don't sell Vista. Their products fail about as much as anyone else that sells hardware contracted out to China.
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Except, well, they aren't. Lots of complaining about Apple products (iMac LCDs, for instance), but 1-3 month main board lifespans aren't among them. So either Foxconn has a higher-quality line for Apple products, Apple supervises Foxconn better than they supervise themselves, or th
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It's not irrational apple hate.
It's pointing out apple is not magically godly quality.
By the way, I'm pretty sure they don't do the Wii, if only because it's ATI graphics and an IBM CPU; highly unlikely Foxconn is the one making the boards.
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XBox 360 also has ATI graphics and an IBM CPU, right?
Apple is not godly quality. They just don't sell the $400 crap, and so their quality is on par with the same stuff you get from Dell or HP when you buy their higher-end stuff that directly competes with Apple. People seem to be comparing a $400 Dell to an $1100 Apple.
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Reason why I mentioned ATI GPU and IBM CPU is because of patent issues that would mean the entire system could not be manufactured in the PRC...
Generally what OEM means in this case...
You do realise a 600$ Dell is about the same as a 1100$ Apple don't you?
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While some of this is undoubtedly the "cool" factor that Apple has grown with the iPod/iPhone, I think another piece of the puzzle is that except for gaming, the pace of hardware cycles is pretty much irrelevant these days. In the late 90's/early 2000's, you could buy a new computer every two years and really feel the speed difference, even if you only used it for basic stuff like email/web browsing/word processing. Close to a decade later, email/web browsing/word processing/etc. are still what 99% of com
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Apple's success is not primarily because of their manufacturing. Everyone knows that.
A lot of people on this board seem to think there's some benefit in intentionally missing the point when someone posts something. I don't know what the benefit is supposed to be though.
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Apple's failure rate is 13% in the first year, same as Dell.
Try again.
DELL's Indecision (Score:4, Interesting)
...Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. years ago shifted to contract manufacturers -- companies that provide production services to others -- to build their portable computers. H-P builds "less than half" of its PCs in facilities it owns, wrote Tony Prophet, H-P's senior vice president for PC supply chain, in an e-mail...
To me, this is the crux of the matter. Dells indecision tells it all. I have had close interaction with folks at DELL and what strikes me, is their apparent indecision when it comes to matters that require immediate attention.
I cannot be convinced that with all the "spying" that goes on withing the PC and Notebook markets, DELL did not know that HP was outsourcing and saving a bunch. They knew but did nothing!
To make matters worse, HP produces better hardware as compared to DELL, in my opinion. So they must be doing something better than DELL.
The one surprise in the article... (Score:4, Informative)
The company owns factories in Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Ireland, India, China, Brazil, Malaysia and Lodz, Poland
I was surprised that they still did manufacturing in the states. I didn't really expect that any PC makers still did.
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The North Carolina factory just went online a year or two ago after my (former) home state gave them millions of dollars in incentives (corporate welfare) to move in.
Glad to get away from that goddamn buncha crooks. Now I live in Arizona where I'm so far unaware of systematic political crime like that, aside from Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
I guess life's a bitch somehow no matter where you live, except maybe Iceland.
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It's cheap now, because your dollar is not that great, it's close to where they are, and the people are trained/educated. So why not?
H-dash-P? (Score:2)
When did HP start getting written as H-P?
I'm trying to figure out why Dell seems to be the most popular office brand. Could it be they simply suck less than the others? Inertia?
Dell's driver downloads are pretty good, although it would be better to get the exact drivers for the service tag, rather than guess if it has a given video chip or option NIC upgrade.
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I'm trying to figure out why Dell seems to be the most popular office brand.
I liked them for seemingly pointless reasons:
Points 1&2 meant our office could image a machine and have the serial number added to the windows machine name quickly with ghostwalk. No thinking or mistyping; reimage then put in place (or reverse for many installations).
Lessons not learned (Score:4, Informative)
That's brilliant! Just the way to sell fewer desktops!
Dell has had huuuuuge problems [direct2dell.com] fulfilling laptop orders because of supply chain problems. So making their desktops the same (bad) way they make their laptops only makes cents. I mean... sense...
Another Asian outsourcer? (Score:2, Interesting)
Very soon this country will lose all its production capability, if the trend of outsourcing everything to MF Asia continues.
Such process, it's becoming a pain to watch.
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Translation: offshoring their manufacturing (Score:4, Interesting)
Dells' factories were in the US, where they had to obey all sorts of US regulations that are expensive to obey; like OSHA rules, making it cost-ineffective to have US factories.
By having a contractor do it instead; Dell can avoid the negative political implications of having to say "they're sending their manufacturing overseas". Instead it will be a matter of a private contractor further outsourcing their work later, and Dell will be insulated from the necessary ramifications of their decision to minimize short-term immediate cost at the expense of control & being a good corporate citizen.
Which will give them some protection against legislation, human rights groups, etc, and various issues that normally occur when a company simply builds factories offshore and shuts down US factories.
Their contractors can have the laptops assembled cheaply offshore then shipped to the US.
Although the quality of the workmanship may diminish dramatically (and Dell laptops will be more prone to certain defects such as say perhaps HP laptops), the cost will be much less for them, when they can pay the labor-intensive laptop assemblers the equivalent of US $0.05 an hour instead of having to meet US federal minimum wage.
Cost savings are unlikely to be passed directly to consumers, so pure profit.
At least in the short term, rather clear why they would see it as a clear win.
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Explains the number of HP laptops I've seen with failed wireless cards. I live in a small college town. The coffee shop I work out of sees a lot of laptops and the number of times I've seen students with HP laptops about 6 - 9 months old digging out a USB wireless card is amazing. Repeatedly, people will come in, suddenly can't get on, and I'll see it's an HP laptop. Sure enough, the wifi card is bad and apparently they're part of the motherboard and can't be replaced, like a mini-pci.
I don't know about
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Perhaps you should stop boosting your wi-fi hotspot through your oven's magnetron.
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At least in the short term, rather clear why they would see it as a clear win.
When I was working in government IT (as a contractor) we were required to buy US manufactured equipment. Dells were very easy to get approved. Apple and others were not.
Once this change of manufacturing source makes it to the government approved purchasing lists, Dell may find that they're no longer the preferred vendor to the government.
This is happening in other industries too... (Score:3, Interesting)
I work for a print publishing firm, and we've been experiencing a recent surge in customers, because publishers are starting to focus on their core competency, which is content generation. The "other" business of printing, quality control, packaging, and distribution is now being out-sourced to other companies who specialize in squeezing the last dollar of efficiency out of this (manufacturing it cheaply, transporting it somewhere cheap to be processed, then ship it out everywhere else), and whose entire purpose in life is to efficiently produce, and distribute printed matter.
I'm sure Dell has complete control of the design of their hardware, where every nut and bolt goes. And the specifications will no doubt be very detailed, if my experience in the print industry's any indication.
It's just a matter of letting the organization that does something very well do it, rather than trying to do everything in-house.
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No, that's the good kind of outsourcing: in any business, it's often advantageous to pay someone else to do the things you just need done, so you can focus all your effort on the business you're actually in. You end up paying less, because even with the premium of hiring out, the outside company is probably more efficient than you would've been, what with it being their primary focus, and all.
But if your publishing firm outsourced it's publishing, then there remains the question, "what do you do again?" Y
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Design separated from manufacturing is not a good recipe for improving quality or driving down cost. My guess is that over time the design expertise will migrate to the outsourced factories.
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My guess is that over time the design expertise will migrate to the outsourced factories.
As it has in IBM and Lenovo case.
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Disclaimer: I work for an Asian supplier (not Foxconn) that provides parts for Dell/HP/Apple computers.
What Dell is doing here is simply reducing in-house manufacturing and focusing on computer design. This is essentially what Apple does and what AMD is doing by selling its fabs.
There is (relatively) little profit margin in manufacturing. This is why IBM sold its Lenovo division and got out of the desktop/laptop market. Factories have high fixed costs (manufacturing equipment, etc) and depends on volume
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Good luck with that, Dell, because your computers have never been renowned (or purchased) for their design. You're not Apple.
Looking back on Dell (Score:5, Informative)
CEO Michael Dell, October 2007, on being asked what he'd do if he were CEO of Apple:
Since then DELL stock has gone up by 72%... while AAPL has gone up 3080%.
Dell's basic problem [daringfireball.net] has been known for a while. They don't do anything unique. They were one of the first to "get" just-in-time custom manufacturing and they rode that horse for a long time, but everything they do, others can do better -- and apparently do.
Innovation, if it can be sustained, always wins over efficiency, because innovative hardware and software design can empower users by orders of magnitude, while efficiency gains approach an ideal asymptotically.
Re:Looking back on Dell (Score:5, Insightful)
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Apple bought NeXT in 1996 which was part of their larger strategy for the OS. The classic MacOS could not be upgraded; it had to be replaced with a new OS. Apple had spent years developing Copland but it was unworkable as a solution. NeXT was their answer for this. This is when Steve came back to Apple.
But when he came back, the people realized why they needed Steve. He had a larger strategic vision for Apple more than their current CEO. The comeback of Apple has been tied to Steve Jobs good or bad.
Free bonus: spare fingers (Score:2)
Yep, if the laptops are made in China you can use workers that make $80 to $150 a month.
And as a free bonus, you might get one of the 1,000+ fingers a day that are chopped off in industrial accidents every day.
Way to save a buck, Dell!
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The American consumer has no qualms about buying from companies that manufacture overseas as long as they get their electronics cheaper.
Recipe for success (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Take everything that made you successful.
2. Throw it away.
Well, I mean, Dell became number 1 in PCs due thanks to a model where you could configure your PC in the web, get it built in good time with a guaranteed level of quality and receive it at your home/office.
First they started adding physical stores to the mix. That's perhaps not too bad, but certainly adds problems of inventory that previously were unknown.
Now they are trying to make themselves virtually indistinguishable from other providers by selling the one piece of their company that made them different, their make-to-order factories.
I suppose that's just one more example of clueless executives applying the reduce-costs recipe because that's the thing they learned in their MBA's. Because that's the easy thing to do, because the costs are written and can be studied. I suppose you need some kind of inventive mind to think ways about adding to the income column, instead of subtracting from the costs one. But what do I know? After all, they make fatter salaries than I do.
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1. Take everything that made you successful.
2. Throw it away.
IBM doesn't sell much typewriters anymore, knowing when to reinvent yourself is also part of business. One thing is if you're being outcompeted, that's one thing but is Dell really being outcompeted on custom builds? Or is the much simpler truth that customers don't have the big need for custom builds anymore? Has in reality Dell become just another of the big standard assemblers selling standard models in volume? And if that's true, where do they go from there? Is there a way to go from there? To use one o
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Mod parent up. Dell rose to prominence in an era of "beige box" PCs where the value of any PC could pretty much be explained as the sum total of a list of its parts. Now, especially with the business switching to laptops, people want to be able to touch and try out a computer before they buy it, and not having any physical presence was killing Dell while Apple and HP were cleaning up. Also, in the early 90s, no one really cared what a PC looked like. Today's "Apple premium" shows that people are willing to
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I think like anything else, have the degree/accredation means nothing. If you really put enough work into it, anyone with a 'high enough' IQ can be a doctor, lawyer or MBA. It doesn't mean that you have the people skills, ability/talent or the intelligence to use the knowledge productively or beneficially afterwards. Some doctors choose to use the same diagnoses time after time if they don't know what their patients have. MBAs were repeatedly critized on the mini-Microsoft blog for their management strategi
The stupidity of the argument... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that contract manufacturers supposedly offer efficiencies because they don't have to listen to Dell's marketing considerations. It would seem to me, then, that Dell's marketing considerations would need to change and all this really is is a low wage subsidy of a fundamentally flawed business.
I'm really sick of MBA's getting American companies out of manufacturing because they lack the engineering knowledge and are too lazy to make it work. If there a company really well led by an MBA? I mean, President Bush has an MBA... look how well he's done.
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What about Apple? (Score:3, Insightful)
Since Apple is pure, clean, and everything
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since when did I think that was a good idea for apple?
since their switch to intel, apple's quality has slipped to the point where i'm wondering where my next machine will come from.
Is there any manufacturer who actually tailors their products to a semi-professional niche?
WOOOHOOOO!! (Score:2)
How will you build you Hackintosh today?
Where will the Government get their computers now? (Score:3, Interesting)
Right now, the U.S. government is one of the largest purchasers of Dell hardware. It used to be IBM they purchased from until IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo. Now the government won't buy Lenovo because their afraid that the machines might be compromised to spy on the user. If Dell moves their factories overseas there's a good chance that the government may stop buying.
I've worked on Dells for a contract manufacturer (Score:3, Informative)
Eight years ago, I was working for Celestica, a Canadian company, building Dell servers. They were outsourcing heavily even then.
Interestingly, given the slant of the above article, we were also building HP servers.
A little observation about the difference in the two companies and their style (or, more to the point, what they were willing to pay for): HP servers were shorts-tested, power-up functional tested, built into boxes, temporary HD's installed, a full OS install done, the boxes run for 2 hours, turned off, the OS *reinstalled* and a complete functional test done, and shipped out.
In contrast, the Dells were shorts-tested, and 1 out of 3 were power-up functional tested, and after that they were shipped out to the company that turned them into complete systems.
It's possible that the next company down the line did a full burn-in functional test. But HP did that, too, in addition to the burn-in functional test we did.
Re:On behalf of the People's Republic of China... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, they can buy more U.S. debt. Our fearless leaders will make sure that there are plenty of opportunities for foreigners to continue buying our asses into financial servitude. How the hell else do you expect to get socialized medicine, tax cuts for 95% of U.S. citizens, socialized pre-kindergarten, a G.I. bill for "community organizers," heavily subsidized alternative energy programs, continued funding for the Ponzi scheme that is Social Security, etc.? Most of us seem to have forgotten the lesson that our parents taught us: money doesn't grow on trees. If you put a dollar in one pocket, it first has to come out of another pocket. It's all just one big shell game, folks.
Money does grow on trees (Score:2)
In a way, now in america it does grow on trees. We chop down trees, make pulp, and print it. (oh, does that mean it devalues the dollar. Hmm, don't tell the fed!)
Re:On behalf of the People's Republic of China... (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't work that way; the debt is not callable at will. The only thing the foreign debt holders can do is stop buying new debt. That would force the rates on treasury securities to go up, until the point those securities became attractive to buyers again.
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It doesn't work that way; the debt is not callable at will. The only thing the foreign debt holders can do is stop buying new debt.
Thanks for the myopic gross oversimplification, but no thanks. Like most debt t-bills can be held or re-securitized in a whole plethora of ways. International banks can use it to boost their balance sheets and borrow against their own notional value. One man's debt is another man's asset and, as certain types of assets become more attractive than others, banks and other financial institutions will shift away from ones of lesser value and toward ones of greater value. That's why you see banks these days taki
Re:On behalf of the People's Republic of China... (Score:5, Informative)
Once a few big countries decide they don't want to continue propping up the dollar, high rates won't do anything but highlight what a house of cards American wealth really is. High rates are meaningless if you can't get a return on your money invested. It's like the value of a Picasso paining that is proven to be a fake, when everyone thought it was legit it was worth millions, and as soon as they lose that faith it is worth a few hundred at best. The only thing that has changed is peoples perception. The move of the world to the Euro is an international vote of "no confidence" in the USA; perceptions are changing. When US debt become worthless paper backed by nothing, the purchasing power of the dollar (also backed by nothing) will follow. Most of our wealth is based on the global perception of value in America, the last several years have destroyed our image of strength, our image of morality, and our image of educated competence. Without that high value on the American brand, we are rapidly becoming a middle of the pack industrialized nation, and the size of our expenditures will soon have to reflect that.