Now that IBM/Lenovo has jumped into the market, Dell remains the lone holdout amongst the top five PC manufacturers
in offering a Tablet PC option. According to a story at
seattlepi.com, Dell does not believe
the market is large enough to warrant their participation.
"We have no immediate plans to get into the Tablet PC business," said Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden. "The market is
still very small."
Too bad. Dell's build-to-order and low-price strategies would be a welcome addition to the space. I'm not completely
sure I understand their reasoning - they recently announced a "Lexus" line of premium PCs. Is that really a bigger
market than Tablets? Does it offer better growth potential? Or is it simply closer to the assembly processes and parts
inventories they're already using?
Dell: no Tablet PCs on the horizon
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. The Motion Computing tablet PCs that Dell does offer are excellent, however. And it's worth noting that Motion Computing is comprised of former Dell and Fujitsu people so it could be thought of as something of a spinoff.
http://www.motioncomputing.com
Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Rob O'Daniel
3. I see no political decision in rejecting tablets, as the issue with AMD-based models, so there must be pure economic reasons. Dell's competitive edge is in its superefficient just-in-time supply chain and direct sales model, which needs economies of scale to become an effective force. They may see tablet as a vertical niche product, where Dell wouldn't be able to provide any additional value, and offering selfbranded tablets from whatever ODM won't do any plus to their product offering either.
Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Daniel Biz?
1. I think one of their problems may be that they sell at such low prices that their margins are tiny and so they have to sell tons of machines to make anything - it's a catch-22 - one of the reasons the market isn't as big as it could be for tablets is because they aren't in it, and they aren't in it because the market is so small.
Posted at 6:18AM on Dec 19th 2005 by Walter