August 7th, 2008
Has Dell lost its mind?
In the wake of Dell Computing’s cloud trademark failure, there’s a ton of chatter.
The word insanity has even been mentioned.
It’s a better question than you think. If you put $100 into Dell back in 1998, at the height of its power and influence, you’re under water.
This decade has been very, very bad for the Round Rock, Texas PC maker. The mass customization and Internet channels it pioneered in the 1990s grew stale. Nothing has replaced it.
Bringing founder Michael Dell to the helm has not yet proven a success. Its marketing has been slammed in court. It is shuffling executives and cutting jobs.
In the wake of all that you have to ask, what did it think it was going to do with cloud computing as a trademark? Spokesman David Frink’s quote that the company would “defend its intellectual property” was, for me, the last straw.
Dell did not succeed in the 1990s as an intellectual property company. It succeeded by delivering precisely what buyers wanted, with bulletproof quality, at the lowest possible price.
In an open source world these are still the keys to success. Not intellectual property. Precision, value, quality.
The term “Cloud Computing,” in other words, is meaningless. It’s jargon. Capitalize it it in the hands of a pointy-headed boss (as it will be) and it’s the ASP boom all over again.
The concept of “cloud computing” is something else again. As monster pipes and unlimited compute power moves from being a proprietary advantage to a standard service, a whole lot of things are going to change.
I have yet to see proof that Dell sees the difference.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
