I own a small computer company. I can't compete with the Dell's and the HP's in the systems that we build. We use top of the line parts in our machines and people would still like to buy a Dell or more likely an HP over ours because of cost alone.

So, we resell Dell and HP, Toshiba, etc. I have a few words for both Dell and HP. With Dell, we are treated like trash. We sell a lot of HP equipment as a result. Dell runs hot and cold sometimes with resellers 'the channel' as is commonly named. We had a dedicated sales person once, for about a month. He called once a week, always responded to emails and quote requests within a few hours even sometimes with just a note that he was busy. That lasted for about a month. Now it's back to 'bastard child' status. Last year we sold more than $50,000 in servers and desktop systems from Dell. We get the cold shoulder... Days or weeks for responses to quotes is more likely now. Never a call. It would seem that if Dell really wanted to 'own the world' they'd stop showing the back of their hand to the resellers that they have. Oh, and 'world class support'? It took us, and our client, 2 weeks to track down the parts to add a RAID array to a server! TWO WEEKS!!!

Try 'third world class' support. Is it really that hard to find someone who knows what you want, and then get all of the parts in at the same time?

HP: You lost out on the server sales because you required us to nearly walk through fire to be able to sell them. The list of requirements also included a huge dollar amount of sales per quarter to retain the ability to sell your servers. Prior to our deals with Dell, every server we had in the field was an HP. Now, they're for god and bad, Dell's...

The computer industry is an interesting sight to behold sometimes... With the missteps and bungles and downright idiocy of some of the companies I sometimes wonder if they are more interested in their own well being or the companies...

One thing that just came out too: we have been Intel product dealers since the beginning of their reseller program. They used to offer 'channel rebates' and ended them a few years back. Well, it appears that the money that the channel used to get went to Dell to stop them from using AMD chips...

It seems to be the height of irony that Dell dropped out of the China market when nearly 100% of their parts come from there... What were they doing? Shipping the parts to Texas and then back to China?

Ain't reality a bitch sometimes...

...is that their time is finite. Sooner or later, Steve Jobs and Michael Dell will be dead, and their respective businesses, having been proven unable to perform without them at the helm, will soon follow suit. These and other companies (Nike, Intel, Amazon) in similar situations need to learn how to survive without the "Great Leader".

China has subpar (if non-existent) labor and environmental standards, how can a U.S. corporation compete?

I know that's supposedly an 'unsophisticated' viewpoint, whatever.

I consider the blind following of globalization w/o consideration leaders to be 'unsophisticated.' Enough with the lip-service, no matter how elegantly delivered (Bernanke is the most trenchant of these) to be largely meaningless, if not downright cynical.

I consider those who are suckers enough to be enthralled by this fluff (w/o at least being smart enough to be directly on the take from these guys) to be the real 'unsophisticates.'

The 'try harder' meme on the part of corporate captains (and Thomas Friedman) is kind of a bunch of B.S.

Dell will have to 'move up the chain,' i.e., start adding value to their products (ya' know, like Apple) in order to compete. Perhaps Michael Dell is the guy to do it, we'll see.

IBM, Compaq (now absorbed into HP), Gateway (eMachines), Dell and many others have left the corporate desktop arena or have pared it back for a number of reasons. But among them is one reason that obscures all the others. Too many models, too many services, too many customizations. All of these companies and divisions have gone broke trying to satisfy massive corporate customers and all of their specific requirements and needs. They want specific hardware features, they want specific image prebuilds, they lack standardization, they want the vendor to provide a level of asset management. And so on. Between sales and break-fix each of these companies has literally thousands of different models each year and they are held to maintaining old inventories for years after. Now one would ask - why anyone do this? It's because like any other sale, there's a huge disconnect between who books the sale, who packages it and who supports it. Say a huge company that makes computers approaches a huge bank. And the bank says "I will buy 100,000 PC + 30,000 per year replacements. All you have to do is custom build them for me and provide all of our images on it up and running when it ships. We will change our specs twice a year but you have to provide support on all old models for the next 3-4 years. I want you to ship them yourselves from the following points, and you have to handle all returns and replacements on your own." Well most vendors would go for that deal figuring they'd lose money the first 12 months to make it up on the back end. But of course they never do because the customer is always changing their requirements and demanding more and more out of scope value. And if the vendor tells the customer to shove off, they just go to the next vendor who will gladly do business with them even though they know it's a dog because no one wants to be seen as giving away a sale to a competitor.

Well after a decade or so of that most of these vendors went broke doing this. IBM spend more than 10 billion on their PC division. And as far as I know they never made a dime on it. Finally Lenovo offered them 2 billion and they took it. Compaq discovered that no one cares for better engineering than IBM and went broke doing that until they were bought by DEC then HP. Gateway's quality control problems were legendary because they spot purchased everything on the cheap and then discovered someone actually expected them to support hundreds of different variations on the same model. Dell (and IBM like them) have so many models that it's nearly impossible to separate them and they cannibalize each others sales. Then it becomes a maintenance nightmare. That's an awful lot to expect of the 3-5% margins you get on the business. And this doesn't even include the problems associated with bloat and bugs inherent in supporting applications and operating systems.

So if any of these firms are to survive they'll have to take a State Socialist (or Henry Ford) approach to it somewhat. You can have the laptop, the desktop or the server. They're all standard, they have few options, they come in putty or grey.