If you've followed the tech sector for any appreciable amount of time, you've no doubt heard the tale of Dell Inc. - one of those stories where a guy with a dream founded a company and eventually built it into a corporate giant. Right from the beginning, Michael Dell believed that the future of PC sales involve building and selling customized IBM PC-compatible computers directly to home users. The first computer of their own design, labeled the "Turbo PC" helped the company gross more than 73 million dollars in its first year alone. And by the turn of the century, Dell would become the largest seller of personal computers, with sales reported to be close to $25 billion dollars.
All good things must come to an end, as they say, and the last decade brought with it a global PC sales slump, as well as increased competition from manufacturers including Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Gateway. When Dell lost its PC sales lead in 2006 following the union of Compaq with HP, Dell looked for a new avenue to increase their ownership base: gamers. Acquiring Alienware in March of that year, Dell gained some insight into leveraging their own customizable selling base with the hardware specs that more discriminating users craved. To further their efforts, Dell even partnered up with Vivendi Universal with product placement in their expansion pack F.E.A.R. Extraction Point - a move mostly unheard of heretofore.
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Review: Hothardware
Feb 26, 2008, 07:29 PM
