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Comment by blhack | Hacker News Reader

What replaced Dell? HP?

Offices are still buying desktop PCs by the pallet-load. What are they buying?

edit: I'll answer my own question: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_leading_PC_vend...

We went with Acer desktops, Apple portables, and HP or SuperMicro servers. Dell decided to classify us as government when we are an educational institution. It was a very, very sore point[1], and the government pricing was 2x the educational price.

1) only time I have ever lost my cool with a vendor

Hmmm .. a company that refuses to sell to a potential customer. And that doubles their prices for the government. I guess one cant be too surprised at their downfall....

Lenovo around here.

EDIT: And in some places, virtual machines. Good for MS and those places, not so good for Dell.

> EDIT: And in some places, virtual machines

All VMs run on hardware.

But it may be increasingly assembled by the providers of virtual services from components, rather than purchased from Dell.

But it's not generally 1-1.

Oh yes, local VMs and VMs on servers and in the cloud are great; but you also need one device in front of each office worker that connects to them.

They are also just NOT buying. A five year old computer should run email and Office just fine. Maybe get a RAM upgrade or something for $50.

There are lots of new companies/employees, businesses are buying lots of computers regardless of how long they are using them for.

I think its also about Microsoft and how the company has failed to provide any real additional value over a Windows XP machine with Office 2001. My corporate client is running XP with Office 2003 and I really wish they'd stuck with the 2001 edition. Same features, less annoying.

Stagnation in innovation is coming back to bite them.

For many of them XP is perfect, a lot of their work is being done online or custom apps.

Those offices are buying super low margin PCs that make Dell very little money.

The PC market is fairly cutthroat, a result of, all things, Microsofts general business philosophy of commodifying its complements.

Based on the earlier rumors of Dell moving into thin clients / hosted PC service, and now Microsoft's stamp of approval assisting in this deal, it seems like there won't be much of a mainstream PC enterprise market in a few years. Just lots of thin clients on desks and lots of big servers somewhere.

lenovo and thin clients

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