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Dell Quietly Leaves MP3 Market
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Thu Aug 24, 2006 06:52 PM
from the going-gently dept.
from the going-gently dept.
An AD-Esque Sitcom writes "Dell has quietly retired from the portable player market. The Dell DJ Ditty — whose website is nothing more than an error now — was absent from Dell's catalogue, and the company was not offering any follow-up products, instead preferring to stick with PCs, printers, and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions. Dell will still be a third-party reseller of other MP3 players like the Creative Zen, but has left the Windows-based player market to the four big players — SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative."
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A Lesson for Late Comers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day there was a phrase going around, which seemed to have great merit: Stick to your core competency. While not always good advice, for there were a few companies who diversified and prospered, it was often easy to find examples of where companies had utterly done themselves in by getting into product lines and services where they were out of their depth or the product/service really wasn't ever going to produce the return hoped for (during hard times these units are often the first closed because the accountants can readliy point them out as hemorraging cash.) Good for Dell, get out and put your mind on sorting out your battery woes and making better PC's (the past years models are a far cry from the quality of early Dell units.)
Microsoft, still willing to bet billions you have an iPod killer and wish to enter the digital music player market? of course, you love the challenge and it encourages those mean old euro dogs to request Windows with the media junk bundled the EU is currently spanking you for.
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Yeah, I wish Apple would have listened to you before they started selling iPods
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There will be an iPod killer (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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And monkeys might fly out my butt...hey...what the fuck...
Seriously though...all the supposed iPod killers thus far have been pitiful imitators.
The real iPod killer is likely to be either
A. something else from Apple, who spends a TON of money on interface design from an artistic and human approach, or
B. something entirely different, that is not just a media player. This is why you find iTunes on phones. Apple realizes that this or potentially the PDA market can displace them fro
the problem is stock holders (Score:5, Insightful)
The bedevelling problem is that public companies have these annoying stock holders who have little patience waiting for a product line to turn a profit. With Dell in particular, they've got razor-thin margins on EVERYTHING, and a bunch of stockholders screaming for profits to double year-after-year. Dell has far less time than a company like Microsoft where they've got huge margins on the OS and office suites, so they frequently win the 'cut off the air supply' waiting game, even when they don't have this 'ingenuity' thing you speak of.
Seth
Parent
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Dell is not that kind of business.
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Simple Lesson Learned (Score:3, Insightful)
Windoze Media is a loser. Hell, they gave those things and the music away and people did not use them. A friend of mine got one from his apartment complex as a spiff for not moving. The DRM'd music the RIAA tried to push on campuses was a flop even when they gave it away. LSU never got suckered with that one so my buddy never bothered. He used WMP, as much as it sucks, to load it up and enjoyed it the player. Would he have spent $200 for it? Never. When he gets a new computer and WMP no longer works
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You mean the way Apple stuck to its core competency as a computer hardware/OS supplier, and not a music distributor, or developer of portable music devices?
That phrase should be ammended to "stick to your competencies". Consumers don't care whether or not this new service is "core", as long as the company does a good job with it. See also Microsoft's foray into hardware, with keyboards, mice
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I agree, but there's a hairball working to choke that off a bit.
It's called dividends and keeping the stockholders happy
The Rule of 72 [1] means every three years will require an annual growth of 24%. That's hard to do year-in and year-out. To make the cut, you either increase sales at a frisky pace, increase the number of products people can buy, or buy someone else.
The responses to maintain whatever magic numbers are expected are obvious, finite, and generate a lot of pain. Those who are in p
Hey (Score:5, Funny)
Better... (Score:2)
Snakes on an MP3 Player (Score:5, Insightful)
What, you didn't notice it? Small wonder, considering the character listening to the Dell MP3 player was known as iPod Girl [snakesonablog.com] until the last minute [snakesonablog.com].
Explosions! (Score:2, Insightful)
Nothing like a bit of flamebait to start some lively discussions!
Do we really need these sorts of comments in the summaries?
Re:Explosions! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Now they've lost so many opportunities... (Score:5, Funny)
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They entered even more quietly. (Score:5, Insightful)
With PR like that - versus Apple's dancing silhouettes - it's no surprise it never sold.
I think it's a good move for Dell (Score:2)
microsoft.. why else? (Score:4, Interesting)
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"Windows-based player market"? What does that even mean? SanDisk, Samsung, Sony, and Creative together have 1/7th of the market, with 6/7ths being iPods. And most iPods are used with Windows. And how can Sony, with, what, a 2% market share, count as a "big player"?
Do you mean Microsoft "Plays For Sure"-based, p
not for me (Score:5, Insightful)
iriver for life
Unless the next model I want to buy sucks, of course.
Zero margin product (Score:3, Insightful)
The excitement is already dying down.
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And this mindset, ladies and gentlemen, is why no one has been able to beat the iPod.
Whose website is nothing more than an error now (Score:4, Funny)
The website is down until they get some replacement batteries for the server.
Dell is cutting its losses, perhaps (Score:4, Insightful)
As for going quietly/gently, that is probably the right way to do it as share holders are scrutinizing their Dell stock and wondering whether or not they should be selling it. News that Dell has dropped their MP3 player, while certainly not a tragedy, may indicate either a weakness or a willingness to cut loose products that just aren't taking off. In effect they're playing it safe.
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Haha (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't let the door hit you on the ass!
P.S. I know I may be modded troll for this one, but its about time this happened. Maybe all of those "analysts" will stop spewing about "iPod-killers" whenever someone comes out with a cheaper mp3 player. They may be driven by price alone, but consumers aren't always (as we have seen here).
windows (Score:4, Insightful)
iPod works with Windows as well.
What happened to Apple? (Score:5, Insightful)
What happened to Apple? My iPod certainly works with Windows.
In the summary... (Score:3, Informative)
Granted, it would be much clearer as Windows Media-based, but I believe that's what the summary was alluding to.
Huh-what? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, let's do some math here. Apple currently has, according to the most recent reports [pcworld.com], about a 75% market share in the portable music player market. If Apple has sold 50+ million iPods to date, that would give us a rough estimate of about 67 million portable music players sold, in total, from all companies who produce said products. 50M iPods, 17M "others."
Last quarter, Apple sold a little over 1M Mac computers, while it sold over 8M iPods. This is not a new trend, either: there are far less Mac owners than there are iPod owners in the world.
So, you're really trying to convince us that out of the 50M iPods that have been sold, there are more people who bought one of the 17M other players that use Windows than there are iPod users who use Windows?!
Did everyone already forget how a big a boon iTunes for Windows was for both Apple and iPod sales?
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Typical of Dell (Score:2)
They see their competition as the 4 other electronics makers, not Apple. That's too many competitors at the manufacturing level to have any real margin.
They will just wait for the inevitable shakeout to happen to the other manufacturers and start their own back up again to regain pricing power leverage after the carnage is over.
Apple gets it, however, by making a great product with superior design and clever marketing.
dude! (Score:5, Funny)
Dell's never done niches well (Score:3, Interesting)
They've had enough hiccups in recent months that the pressure to execute is probably building. Dell has never been about "cool", or innovation. They've always been a supply chain-oriented company who makes money by taking a proven technology, building it faster and cheaper than everyone else, and taking advantage of every inventory trick in the book to keep the balance sheet clean. That works great for computers, but virtually nobody would ever buy a MP3 player over the web from them based on that alone. And Dell can't do sexy like Apple can. No wonder Michael Dell always sounds so bitter when he talks about Apple. He's about as much of an Anti-Jobs as any tech CEO could possibly be.
in other news (Score:2)
Dell also decides to quit making pcs and concedes to Apple.
Fiery Death (Score:2, Informative)
and not killing people in fiery laptop-related explosions
Seems like Dell is taking all the blame for Sony's problem. http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=33 926 [theinquirer.net]
Not completely accurate (Score:4, Funny)
I'm a Dell representative, and I'd like to say that this statement is not entirely true. We're also in the business of selling monitors, and we'll continue to kill people in fiery laptop-related explosions.
Uhm.. Apple has a Windows-based player... the iPod (Score:3, Informative)
I'd say that Apple should be in that list of players who make a Windows-based portable audio device. The iPod works on Windows too.
Windows based? (Score:3, Insightful)
Strangely iTunes and iPods also work just fine on Windows. Was he attempted to say Windows-centric? Mac-ignoring perhaps? Or did he mean based on PlaysForSure? Microsoft Sponsored? Windows-only? Obviously they aren't all running Win CE.
Fiery Explosions? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow, great piece of editorial comment there! I'm not one to defend cooperate giants here, but Sony is to blame for the shoddy electronics not Dell. Dell at least was the first to issue a recall for the battery issue. Apple uses the same batteries that cause fires and they are just NOW coming out with the a recall. They've known about it for a long time now. HP has about 3 million of the batteries in circulation and who knows how many Sony laptops contain the dodgey batteries. Neither of those companies have even issued a warning about the batteries, nor has Sony owned up to the issue and prefers to let the distributors of their energy storing grenades take the fall.
If you want to flame a company, flame Sony. How exactly does Dell come out looking like the bad guy here? And on an article about MP3 players no less.
Slashdot is getting as bad as Fox news. Congratulations editors.
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