Dell’s namesake, CEO Michael Dell, made a symbolic statement at an enterprise launch event that his company wasn’t really a PC builder. He argued to a San Francisco audience including Forbes that his company, which started off making custom PCs, was “not really a PC company” and instead that it was an “end-to-end IT company that really understands the needs of its customers.” As an illustration of this, the introductions were focused not just on servers of all sizes but 10Gbps Ethernet equipment and networked storage.
His statements were partly meant to claim an edge over HP, which Dell saw as catching up on enterprise-level features, but came not long after Apple chief Tim Cook had contended his company was the only one producing innovation in PCs. Dell and HP both objected to the assertion, although they made nothing but generic references to innovation.
Much of the company’s shift in the past five years has been towards either less volatile services or towards higher-end PCs like the XPS 14z. Premium computers have been shown as less vulnerable to competition and economic crunches.
