Charles on… anything that comes along

Two things caught my eye: Om Malik on rumours IBM will quit the PC business: Dell, the supply chain managers have kicked their asses out of business. Only a matter of time before HP quits, and Gateway vanishes. Dell versus the Chinese.

Given that BusinessWeek just did a scary edition on “the Chinese price”, which is 30% lower than the US-made price, that’s a scary idea. For Dell.

Meanwhile Neil Mc examines the iPod phenomenon: a flash-based iPod, he argues, would give Apple complete and utter dominance across the entire music player sector (as opposed to complete and utter dominance at the hard drive-based end). And, super super super importantly, it’ll increase the lock-in factor. This last point is key. Very insightful. Nobody else has the same degree of lock-in in this market. And remember, in technologies an effective strategy is to make it slightly too expensive to change, even if the alternative is a bit cheaper or better.

I’m sure you can think of a case where that already applies.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• Michael Dell re Blu-Ray, and disable those iPod nano scratches! (4 October 2005; score: 59.15%)
• Dell explains why it killed customer forums (sort of); and that Shuttle delay in full (14 July 2005; score: 58.61%)
• Dell shuts customer support forums.. because they're full of criticism (13 July 2005; score: 53.52%)