As someone who was buying hardware in the late 1990s, it is hard to overstate the difference in buying experience between Sun or Digital (DEC) and someone like Dell. The former forced you into a live sales meeting, endless quote revisions, it was a nightmare. I remember calculating the server rails and power cords for a new Alpha server were going to cost more than a shipped/delivered Dell server that I could get the next day.
For us dell has become that. Rep changes all the time, what appears to be random pricing and long unclear delivery dates. Instead I can for example go to Thomas Kren and configure my serves online for a fraction of the cost. They have what they list in stock, delivered a few weeks later. Everything is clear and hasle free.
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
The iron law is that vendors want to become like the old Sun. The only reason they don't is if they are trying to compete their way up the hill. Take away the old Sun and SGI and IBM and now Dell is Sun.
Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps. All that Dell does is assembling standard, commoditized parts and putting a free OS on it. Dell's business is incredibly easy to replicate, while Sun's business is extremely hard to replicate. Of course, Sun's competitive advantage turned into a curse when the components of that vertical integration become uncompetitive both features and price wise vs. the GNU/Linux-on-Intel stack. But regardless, Dell could never replicate the vertical integration Sun had.
> a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.
True but Apple is a consumer company that makes consumer products. Sun lost all interest in that already by the early 1990s. They were happy to just be standard unix and didn't do anything to be a real consumer company. They talked a lot about competing with Microsoft but didn't actually.
They talked about buying Apple, and they could have, but the CEO basically admitted they had no clue what so ever on what to do with Apple.
They had no vision or concept of what being a consumer company would even be like. Even in the 80s they were focused on engineers and costumers like that, never end costumers.
coreyh14444 · · focus · HN ↗
sschueller · · focus · HN ↗
At this point I have the feeling dell just charges you what they think they can get out of you. You push back and the price drops, I don't want to negotiate.
PaulHoule · · focus · HN ↗
cherryteastain · · focus · HN ↗
gofreddygo · · focus · HN ↗
this is apple today.
panick21_ · · focus · HN ↗
They talked about buying Apple, and they could have, but the CEO basically admitted they had no clue what so ever on what to do with Apple.
They had no vision or concept of what being a consumer company would even be like. Even in the 80s they were focused on engineers and costumers like that, never end costumers.