Technology ; Dell seeks to open second PC plant in Europe
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Technology News, SAN FRANCISCO, Dell Inc. is looking to open its second European production plant, its chairman said on Tuesday, and a source familiar with the plan said the company was considering a location in France.
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Dell Inc. (DELL.O), the world's largest PC maker, could announce an expanded selection of its consumer electronics line in the next several weeks, a retail industry analyst said on Wednesday.
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Dell Inc. says it opened a new support center this week in Xiamen, China, for business customers who buy servers and storage equipment.
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Dell Inc. is pushing ahead with plans to open IT support hubs worldwide to improve its service delivery to buyers of its servers, storage devices and workstations. Although the hubs are aimed primarily at enterprise customers, they will also cover consumers and small and midsize businesses.
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Dell (DELL) said Tuesday that it would build a US manufacturing plant in North Carolina, employing at least 1,500 people within five years.
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DellÂ is considering opening a second European production plant to support its steady growth on the continent.
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Dell has won a large global contract from Dutch electronics giant Koninklijke Philips ElectronicsÂ to provide hardware and managed desktop services.
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Dell plans to sell computers with preinstalled Linux outside the U.S. as well as offer the Ubuntu Linux distribution to small business customers.
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Dell Inc. DELL.O, the world's  largest PC maker, could announce an expanded selection of its  consumer electronics line in the next several weeks, a retail  industry analyst said on Wednesday.
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InfoWorld - Dell plans to sell computers with preinstalled Linux outside the U.S. as well as offer the Ubuntu Linux distribution to small business customers.
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Dell yesterday announced three new storage systems across Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) designed to help change the economics of storage by bringing enterprise-class capabilities to SMB customers, allowing them to scale their operations as storage needs increase.
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Obeying the courts, Windows will no longer have a Media Player in Europe. Also:  Monsanto buys another seed maker & hellip;.  Robot soldiers ready for Iraq & hellip;. and more.
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(InfoWorld) - The new team of leaders at Dell is weighing a request to give customers the option to purchase PCs with the Linux OS, instead of the default Windows, after thousands of users voted for that idea on a company blog. The idea appeared Friday on a company-hosted blog called Dell Idea Storm. CEO Michael Dell unveiled the blog Feb. 16 as part of hisÂ effort to reinvigorate the struggling company. Dell said he hoped to use the blog to collect users' feedback and improve customer service. Since then, company executives and department heads have been monitoring the site, paying closest attention to the ideas winning the most votes, Dell spokeswoman Caroline Dietz said on Wednesday. The most popular threads on Wednesday included demands for Linux-based laptops, consumer PCs that are not pre-loaded with unsolicited applications and requests for Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice applications instead of Microsoft's Office suite. Popular requests also included a preference for Mozilla's Firefox Web browser instead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and pleas for Dell to stop routing service calls to operators in overseas countries such as India. Dell leaders have heard those ideas "loud and clear," and plan to post a statement on the blog this week explaining how they will react, Dietz said. But she warned that the company would judge ideas on more than just their popularity. "Just because an idea is number one or number two doesn't necessarily mean Dell will do it, but it does mean it will receive the highest level of attention," she said. Dell has already changed the blog rules to make the voting more accurate, after the site was flooded over the weekend by certain users clicking multiple times on their favorite links, Dietz said. Beginning Wednesday, Dell required users to register, ensuring that each person can vote just once for each posting. Another misleading aspect of popular threads is that each vote awards postings 10 "points," meaning that the Linux thread has about six thousand supporters, not the posted number of 67,703. The second-most popular thread -- the request for OpenOffice -- has 40,572 points, and a plea to avoid unwanted software applications has 27,476 points. Most other ideas on the 95-page blog have won only a handful of votes. Despite the blog's problems, Dell will someday decide to sell Linux-based PCs in their consumer market, experts say. "Look, they already have a strong partnership with Red Hat and Oracle to move Linux into the enterprise server space. I think what they're waiting for is some more compelling applications to show up on Linux for personal use. Think about what you use your laptop for -- it's usually office, games, music and Internet access. When all of these things come together in a consumer-friendly, seamless way there will be a case for Dell to adopt Linux on portables to sell to the masses," said Joe Clabby, president of Clabby Analytics. "My 84 year-old father-in-law only needs his PC for light word processing and for AOL access. He can get plenty of Linux word processors -- but where's AOL Linux? When the right applications show up, and when they are integrated, it will all come together," Clabby said. Fixing Dell's finances could call for such a bold move. Once a Wall Street darling thanks to its innovative "direct sales" business model, Dell has struggled in recent months with falling profits, anÂ accounting investigationÂ by federal stock regulators, a lawsuit by disgruntled investors, aÂ notebook battery recallÂ and finally the resignation on Jan. 31 of Dell's hand-picked successor as CEO, Kevin Rollins. SinceÂ resuming his job as CEOÂ of the company he founded in 1984, Dell has moved quickly to restore investors' confidence by ousting several long-time executives and replacing them with leaders from outside technology companies including Motorola and Selectron. Â
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Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c50021)  has announced the addition of "Computer  Hardware in France" to their offering.
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Dell Inc.  expects  production in China for domestic sales to keep growing at about  30 percent in the short term, meaning the PC giant might add  another factory there in three to four years, its top  manufacturing executive for the country said.
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(InfoWorld) - Dell began polling customers about their software preferences on Tuesday as part of an effort by the struggling PC vendor to meet a popular request for desktops and notebooks that run on Linux instead of Windows. Dell posted the survey on a company blog, asking PC users to choose between Linux flavors such as Fedora and Ubuntu, and to pick more general choices such as notebooks versus desktops, high-end models versus value models, and telephone-based support versus community-based support. The company plans to collect votes through March 23, then use the feedback to begin selling Linux-based consumer PCs. Dell already uses Linux in certain server models. "Taking a few minutes to complete this survey will help us define our forthcoming Linux-based system offerings," said Dell software architect Matt Domsch in his blog posting. "We'll take some time to analyze your feedback and work to provide the platforms and options you choose." TheÂ groundswell of demand for LinuxÂ began in February, shortly after company founder Michael Dell returned as CEO. Previous chief executive Kevin Rollins resigned in January as the company began to flounder during a series of problems, from drooping earnings reports to delayed financial filings, an accounting investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and an investor lawsuit. As part of his campaign to help the company renew its profits and regain market share from Hewlett-Packard, Michael Dell launched a company blog to collect customer feedback. Users immediately filled the blog with requests for an alternative to Microsoft's Windows Vista OS and Office suite, such as the Linux OS and OpenOffice productivity tools. On Feb. 23, Dell announced it will work with NovellÂ to install Linux on business PCs, including OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Dell Precision workstations. Dell also said it will work with other Linux providers since users requested many other versions of the OS, such as Novell/Suse Linux Desktop, Red Hat Enterprise Desktop, Fedora, OpenSuse, and Ubuntu. Although Michael Dell's populist approach is winning some praise, the change may come too late to save company profits in the short term. On Tuesday, a prominent analyst noted that Dell has been cutting the number of notebooks it orders from manufacturers in Taiwan. While the industry as a whole is expected to rebound in March from a sales slump preceding the launch of Windows Vista, Dell will deviate from that trend and trim its order for notebook manufacturing, said Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner in the report. Dell did not respond to a request for comment on the forecast. Dell is struggling financially, listing revenue and earnings growth at four-year lows even as its competitors begin to trim their costs and boost profits, Gardner said. At the same time, Dell faces future challenges as it sees slowing growth in its major markets, aggressive pricing by competitors willing to sell PCs at lower operating margins, and a general decline in prices as consumers find they can run more software applications on low-end PCs. Still, Dell's PC production remains slightly above the consensus forecast, Gardner said. In fact, the report counseled investors that HP and AppleÂ stock could rise faster than expected in the first half of 2007, and Dell will follow with strong long-term growth, beating estimates over a 12-to-18-month time span.
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(InfoWorld) - PC vendors reported global shipment growth of 12.5 percent in the second quarter as every major vendor except Dell posted a double-digit percentage increase in unit shipments compared to the same period last year, according to a report released Wednesday by IDC. Dell shipped 4.9 percent fewer PCs during the quarter than it did in 2006 as the company continued to struggle with a corporate restructuring effort that has included deep job cuts, changes in executive leadership, and a new strategy of selling computers through retail channels instead of only online. In contrast, Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) consolidated its position as the world's largest PC vendor with unit shipment growth of 36.5 percent. Overall, vendors sold 58.8 million PCs in the quarter, IDC said. A report released on the same day by Gartner showed similar results with Dell sliding 5.5 percent compared to HP's growth of 36.6 percent. Gartner reported that global PC shipments rose 11.7 percent to 61.1 million units. HP is seeing good results because of a multifaceted approach that allows the company to concentrate its sales efforts on new regions if sales slump in another sector, said David Daoud, manager of the personal computing and PC tracker programs at IDC. "They are not putting all their eggs in a single basket," he said. "That is the result for a company that has adopted a multifaceted approach. PC shipments were slightly better than expected in the U.S., but they have done even better outside the U.S. in emerging markets and western Europe. So they can manage multiple regions." Despite the contrast in trends, none of the top five vendors changed their worldwide rankings by market share. For the quarter, HP claimed the top spot with 19.3 percent of global PC sales volume, leading Dell with 16.1 percent, Lenovo with 8.3 percent, Acer with 7.2 percent and Toshiba with 4.1 percent, according to IDC. The Gartner study showed the same rankings. However, Acer could soon begin to climb the rankings, if its success continues. The company improved its PC shipment volume by 55.4 percent in the second quarter, pulling close behind Lenovo, which grew at 22.3 percent. "Acer is laser-focused on particular segments, especially SMB and channel resellers," Daoud said. "They are just plowing." In the U.S., Acer is only the sixth-biggest PC vendor but showed the fastest rise in shipments, improving by 163.8 percent over the second quarter of 2006. Overall, the U.S. market is lead by Dell with 28.4 percent market share by shipments, then HP with 23.6 percent, Gateway and Apple with 5.6 percent each, Toshiba with 5.3 percent, and Acer with 5.2 percent. IDC counts PC shipments including sales of desktops, notebooks, ultraportables, and x86 servers, but not handhelds. Overall, the global market achieved its 12.5 percent shipment growth in the quarter thanks to good activity in the Asia-Pacific region and to slightly better than expected activity in the U.S., Daoud said. That growth rate was higher than the first quarter, when shipments rose 10.9 percent over that period in the previous year, and higher than the second quarter of 2006, when shipments rose 9.7 percent year on year. For the future, consumers continue to buy notebooks instead of desktops as the cost premium between the two models has narrowed to its smallest differential yet. IDC forecast strong growth in the second half of 2007 but said that market competition will be more complex than just cutting prices. Instead, PC vendors will try to get customers' attention with system design, customer service, channel coverage, and market expansion.