Dell Quietly Leaves MP3 Market 166
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."
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]
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.
They're still available.... (Score:1, Informative)
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.
Re:not for me (Score:2, Informative)
Both iriver and my personal current favourite iaudio [cowonamerica.com] produce very good players, it's just that the masses waggle along and buy shit like ''Sony'' (because of brand) or ''Noname'' (because of price)
Re:A Lesson for Late Comers? (Score:3, Informative)
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 pain are very good at showing people sh5t flows downhill. And the various levels of management who normally do one of their most important tasks, acting as a buffer have to put that aside.
I've been through it a couple of times.
The simplest example was in the computer book publishing world, where the executives wore gold handcuffs, which is the general method of motivation throughout the business world. Word was given to the parent company [that] the next year's sales would increase 20%. Word within the division (holding the imprints) was an increase of 30% would be required. If anything over 20% occurred, the divisional prez made his bosses happy. The internal 20% was a different story: it affected those who answered to him. The only problem at the CEO/Publisher level was: the number of titles published within each imprint couldn't change.
Cook the books? {snicker} Books were "pulled up a month" (either monthly, quarterly, or annually): if they were scheduled for early to mid September, an order to find ways to cut corners and get it into the August schedule was made. Scheduled for mid to late October? They'd find a way to pull it into September in order to make monthly and quarterly numbers. (Fun?) What happened if Borland or Microsoft didn't ship their software on schedule or made some changes, albeit minor, between their final build and the gold disk? It took some time before I could convince them to make their "Ship To Publisher" date the same as software's "Gold to Manufacturer" and there wouldn't be as much jumping around.
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[1] Doubling occurs when ( 72 == years * percentage)