Wow. Those are words I never thought I’d write. Even now, I wonder if perhaps I’m in some other bizarro dimension. But, according to the Wall Street Journal, Dell has postponed their plans to launch a digital music player, a project they’d planned to launch before the holiday.
We got wind of the project back in July, which counted among its advisors a certain favorite “analyst” of ours. The product was based on a platform called Zing that Dell had acquired a while back, run by a former Apple exec, Tim Bucher. It would have probably involved a subscription service and also a standard that would let you listen to music from a number of different service—a standard perplexingly not named MP3.
Look, I don’t think Michael Dell has ever quite gotten what they’d need to be doing to compete with Apple. Dell (both the company and its CEO) is about business, not about design, no matter how much they try. Case in point:
But since returning as the Round Rock, Texas, company’s CEO last year, Mr. Dell has emphasized design. In a conference call last fall, he said Dell would increase consumer sales by engendering “product lust.” Dell said it would “focus on ‘killer’ products, next-generation materials,” and a “shorter development cycle” to get products out “40% to 50% faster.”
I think the reason Apple’s designs are so effective is that they don’t attempt to “engender” product lust—they attempt to make something that looks good to them. And I think that’s why Dell will fail if they try to be Apple—the same way Apple would fail if they tried to be Microsoft.
In fairness to Dell, they have been banging out some nice looking products of late, and that's not something I thought I'd find myself saying 5-years ago. This, I think, is a tribute to Apple's influence on the market. While new Apple products tend to be decried as "form over function", they have clearly been driving the consumer electronics market to producing more products that look appealing. Even Dell appears to have learnt. Hell may indeed have frozen over...
Mind you, whoever is in charge of design at Dell's Alienware division needs to be fired. Their new 17" laptop is horrendously bad.
I'm sure that you meant the first sentence of your last paragraph to read:
I think the reason Apple's designs are so effective is that they don't attempt to “engender” product lust-they attempt to make something that looks good to Steve.
Why does my sign in info appear when I make a comment????????????????????
". . . a project they'd planned to launch before the holiday."
Before the holiday? Which holiday, exactly? American Thanksgiving (or as I like to say Yanksgiving)? New Year's Day? The first day of Kwanzaa (or Boxing Day to the Commonwealth)? Ramadan '09? How about Shichi-Go-San, Guadalupe Day, Guy Fawkes Day, or Defender of the Fatherland Day?
I'm so sick of the P.C. over-reaction of "we can't offend anyone so we don't dare say 'Christmas.'" I'm just waiting for whomever decides what's P.C. to realize that "holiday" comes from Holy day.
(I do realize that it may not have been your choice, Dan, but rather editorial standards. This is more of a general rant.)
@Wondercow: Actually it was a typo. I meant to write "holidays." No sinister intent, I'm afraid.
I stand by my rant. They want it out for Christmas--or at least the Christmas season. It's a convention of political correctness that we can no longer publicly say "Christmas". (Just to be clear, I'm not ranting because of any offense to Christians, I'm ranting because P.C. has been taken way to far. Companies gear up for Christmas and, to a lesser extent, Chanukah.) Grrrr.
@Wondercow: Not that this isn't terribly off topic, but honestly, I just think people realize there's more than one holiday in the winter season. For my part, it has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with accuracy.