HP and Dell have basically the same volume (give or take 5% on any
given quarter). HP has had little trouble getting sufficient volumes
of AMD chips, so why should Dell be any different?
As usual, the answer is that Dell (both the man and the company) are
just feeding a nice easy line that doesn't tell the real story. I've
managed to gain a bit of an insight into the behind-the-scenes
workings of the computer industry of late, and I've learned an
important characteristic about both Dell and about HP. In the case of
HPaq the one thing I've learned is that no one seems to know what
anyone else in the company is doing.
HP was always a highly divisionalized company - kinda like a wannabe
mini-IBM; also, traditionally, companies which valued OEM resellers & ISVs
as part of their business model had to present an image which did not
threaten those important 3rd parties. Some of those divisions, dating back
to the days of minicomputers, have faded way, or, as in the case of
Agilent, been spun off but the corporate culture has stuck to a certain
extent. At one time they had at least three separate divisions making
PC-type devices targeted at different vertical sectors - they used to
exhibit at conferences separately.
During the darkest days of the Carleton era I suspect that they came very
close to a spin-off/management buy-out of the printer division... something
I would not totally rule out even now.
The one thing I've found about
Dell is that what they say in the media and what happens in reality
usually have little in common with one another.
Has DFS gotten over its hump of bad rep yet? They came pretty close to a
legal catastrophe there AIUI.
Dell has some good (and some bad) reasons for not using AMD chips, but
manufacturing capacity is NOT one of them.
I think the problem for Dell with AMD is that the CPUs they covet, for
servers, are the ones which will hurt their relationship with Intel the
most. I find it hard to believe that Intel would put up with Dell selling
Opterons into the high ASP sector while at the same time allowing Dell to
dump low-end Intel CPUs in desktops. It breaks the Dell-Intel equation.
, I just upgraded