Thanks to NBEHTM for drawing my attention and wrath to this article.

I would dismiss this if it came from somebody other than Gartner. If this came out of John C. Dvorak, someone inclined to incite rather than inform, this would be laughable. Gartner, however, is supposed to be a reputable research company. Well, was supposed to be, at least.

This Gartner report makes it clear that the authoring analyst has fallen victim to something common amongst people who lack vision - this analyst is trying to define success for Apple by making comparisons to Microsoft or Dell. The blog Daring Fireball makes the point very well that Apple’s business practices aren’t to be compared to its traditional tech industry competitors. Apple is fundamentally different from its traditional competitors because Apple truly strives to be better rather than ubiquitous - therefore, lower market share is of less consequence to Apple than it would be for Dell or HP.

And that’s exactly what the Gartner analyst didn’t get - Apple is a rare entity in the marketplace. Because Apple truly tries to do better, Apple can justify following a different process with regard to production, charging a (slight) premium for superior design and integration, eschewing the processes and trends of the masses.

While the rest of the industry will scratch and scrape to eek the very last fraction of a penny out of the production channel, cutting R&D and sacrificing the consumer experience, Apple will continue toward its vision of actually making an awesome product. Customers will respect Apple for it and Apple will be able to continue to serve its own ethic of producing products that Apple employees would love to use.

After all, when was the last time you heard anybody say that they loved Windows? Or thought that Bill Gates had a handle on what was really cool? Or lusted after the sleek designs of Dell desktops?

Gartner needs to review its hiring practices.

Dell doesn’t need to be resurrected, what with it not being dead and all - far from it. Still, analysts and professional prognosticators are crowing about Dell’s big problems and, not wanting to be left out of the fun, I’ve decided to toss in with my few ideas. Here they are, in no particular order: my collection of magical bullets that will save Dell from imminent destruction.

First thing I’d do - hire a designer that isn’t impaired.
Whatever impairment the Dell guy suffers from is serious, and I grieve for him and his family. Whether it’s out of sympathy or compassion or whatever, Dell keeps this designer going, which is kudos for them and their charity. But instead of just giving the designer an office and mostly ignoring him, they’ve given him the run of their product line. Bad.

Here’s an anecdotal example of what bothers me about Dell design. For years the standard Dimension tower computer featured this enormous gray flap. This flap lifted up, but this fact wasn’t obvious to many. Underneath this flap were USB ports and headphone jacks. The flap opened upward and the USB ports faced downward. The flap was situated toward the bottom of the computer.

So what’s the issue? Consider that most tower computers sit on the floor. Assuming you know that the USB ports were there, you would have to get to them by lifting the flap which totally blocks your view of the panel with the USB ports. Then you literally are reaching down to the floor and blindly trying to plug your cable into a socket you can’t even see.

This wonder of design has me convinced that Dell employees don’t actually use Dell products, otherwise this “feature” wouldn’t have lasted a week. Personally, because of how poorly the flaps actually functioned - apart from how tacky they looked - I’ve seen many offices that simply removed the flaps entirely.

Second thing I’d do - take some of that (paltry) R&D budget and heave it at some (non-in-house) software developers.

Taking a page from Google, Dell should be on the lookout for fun and useful applications and should be chucking some of their (paltry) R&D budget toward the developers. In return they should get a huge number of free licenses, or licenses for cheap.

Consider Picasa, an application that Google picked up a while ago. If Dell could find a Picasa wannabe and set them up, Dell would have the beginnings of its very own iLife suite. Toss in Firefox and Thunderbird as the default mail and web applications and Dell starts to offer a better and safer online experience for their customers right out of the box. Add in a few more apps, like maybe a simple movie editor, Paint.Net or GIMP-type image manipulators, and you start to have an interesting base of applications that make a Dell a good buy beyond simply the cost factor. And all for very little actual cost to Dell. Microsoft might complain about Internet Explorer being ditched in favor of Firefox, but is Bill G really prepared to cut Dell and its nearly 20% domination of the PC OEM business out? I think Dell can dictate what it’s going to do to the industry without fear of reprisal.

Interesting side effect of including software with its PCs - Dell could instantly create whole new economies for software and support and services. If 10% of all users buying Dells actually use the included image editor/viewer/manipulator, you’ve instantly got the equivalent to the entire installed base of iPhoto users. That’s huge. Ensure that there’s an API to go along with the application and small companies can start offering complementary services, like direct-to-eBay publishing plugins or whatever. Get a small software start up that makes a killer app, that’s another thing Dell can toss a little cash at and include as a perk for buying Dell - it’s a cycle that feeds itself once it’s started.

Third thing I’d do - streamline the product line and introduce a different pricing structure.
Simply put, going to the Dell site feels like going to a car dealership. It’s not a pleasant experience and somehow you always feel like you just got jipped/swindled.

I went over to Dell and started counting how many different models of laptop they have. I stopped at 20, and I wasn’t much more than 1/2 way through. What is interesting to me about this is that Dell was the pioneer of Build to Order on the epic scale. Given this, why do they need 20+ models of laptop? Is this something that their customers really demand? Why can’t Dell create, say, five models of laptop and let all the holes be filled with BTO variations? Create one product per “bracket” that is intended to dominate that bracket. Brackets could be:

• Ultra-budget laptop. Small screen, lightweight processor, little RAM, small HDD, limited connectivity options. Gets people online and editing documents, but not much else.
• Kitchen-counter laptop. Reasonable screen, processor and RAM, not really hot in multimedia, but more connectivity to wireless and whatnot. A noticeable bump from the Ultra-budget model.
• Small-business laptop. Enough juice to run several Office apps without choking, nice specs generally but compromises on things like separate video cards and RAM.
• Pro laptop. Nice features, including lots of processor, RAM and HDD, separate video card and memory, plus connectivity options galore. Still, when possible, choices in parts will favor enhanced battery longevity.
• Gamer/desktop-replacement laptop. Best of everything, no compromises.

The product line listed above could be adapted, through BTO, to handle any variation of need that customers would have. There is no need to offer 20+ products. Seriously.

The other point was about pricing. Given five products, choose a fair price for a decent configuration and make that the price that’s quoted. Dell essentially scams people by quoting low prices for stripped-down systems - once you have it the way you’d want it the price suddenly is back to normal. Skeezy car dealers do the same thing by offering a new Mustang for cheap (it’s a Mustang without a radio, with plastic seats, wooden tires and a three cylinder engine). This is a practice that leaves customers, even customers that go ahead and buy the product in spite of everything, feeling that they just got a bad deal. This perceptions persists regardless of whether the perception is valid. Dell needs to focus some time and effort trying to build a perception that they are giving their customers a great deal. Or at least a fair deal.

One more thing and I’ll stop my rant, I promise.

Fourth thing I’d do - stop trying to shoe-horn products into a business model they aren’t necessarily suited for.
TVs. When was the last time you bought a TV without seeing it in person? I never have, though admittedly I’ve only ever bought two new TVs larger than 14″ in my life.

From what I understand, Dell does a pretty good business with their TVs, but even so this might be an area where breaking with the direct-to-consumer model might be in order for Dell. Here’s my revolutionary concept - spin TVs off into a separate company. There aren’t any movements to integrate the capabilities of TVs into any of the other products, so just set up a company called Dell Electronics and hand over the consumer electronics portions of the Dell product line (TVs, music players, etc.). Dell still sells their consumer electronics through an online direct-to-consumer channel, but also seeks to put these particular products into big-box stores like Best Buy and Compusa so that customers can see the products with their own eyes. I’ve seen Dell TVs and they’re nice - I think more people would buy them if they had a chance to see them outside a chance encounter at a friends house or in a non-flattering corporate environment where the thing is showing Power Points.

Dell Electronics would take a drop in profit for any units moved through the big retailers, but for customers who could delay gratification, the online channel could still offer better deals at higher margins.

So that’s it. I think that Dell could be doing so much more for themselves and for consumers if they tried to focus less on cutting the bottom out of everything and focused more on making a great buying experience for its customers. Is that naive?

Dell isn’t my favorite computer manufacturer, despite being the largest and most successful computer seller in the world with around 19% of the market according to Business Week. I’d like to think that I’ve got legit reasons for not caring for Dell rather than just being a playa hata.

So let’s get started. What has Dell, with their enormous power, reach and influence done for computerdom? Of course they brought USB into the mainstream, making cheap and universal peripherals possible. Oh, wait, that was Apple. Okay, they pioneered the home computer media center - oops, wrong again. That was Gateway. Okay, well they’ve been at the forefront of the revolution of computer industrial design. Wrong again - Apple, Sony and to a lesser extent HP.

Truth is Dell hasn’t really been a leader in any sort of innovation, that I can think of (save for a few minor, marginally effective and narrowly adopted system management firmware applications intended for enterprise) in the ten years they’ve been #1 in the PC business.

Dell has squandered its time on top of the heap. Even now, after so much time to develop itself as a platform, to innovate or whatever, Dell hasn’t managed to make itself valuable for anything else than its cost. I’ll repeat that because I think it’s important. There is no value in a Dell computer outside of cost.

I love the question in the Business Week article that asked if Dell was a one trick pony. It appears to me that they are. It also appears to me that they always will be - this article, also from Business Week, includes an observation that Dell spends less than 1% of its budget on R&D annually. This blew my mind when I read this because it has to be understood that this 1% of R&D is being spread not just over desktop computers, but over servers, laptops, music players, big-screen televisions, projectors and more. No wonder they haven’t innovated in a decade - their R&D budget is big enough to buy lunches for the team and keep the lights on and that’s it.

Not quite, but you get my point. So what should Dell do? I think, if Dell were smart, they would realize that the commodity days of the PC business are ending - and their model has to change to adapt. It’s no longer acceptable to let Microsoft and Intel do all the innovation - Dell has to start treating their brand as a platform, much like Apple does. Dell needs to start to find ways to get people excited about using their products, rather than settling because of price.

There was a great suggestion in the second BW article that encouraged Dell to develop ways to ensure easy customer data migration. This would be a great first step, but would require a lot of development effort and expertise that Dell hasn’t earned itself in the 10 years its been on top.

I’ll continue this tomorrow.

Continuing the series.

Point 4 - Platform uniformity unlocks developer creativity
Apple seems to have a disproportionally large percentage of truly creative development taking place on its Mac platform. Consider Textmate, X-plane, Coverflow, Delicious Library and iAlertU as a few of the numerous examples of third-party wonders that exist within the Apple community. Feel free to show me applications that show similar levels of innovation in the Windows/PC realm, if you can find them.

Why does Apple seem to have this lock on developer mind share/imagination? There are several factors at play, but I think the following are the most significant:

• Apple’s image as a platform for creative developers draws in creative developers. In this case perception actually does create the reality. Where other platforms trumpet that they are “ready for business” or some other mundane idea, Apple encourages it’s community to be rebels, innovators, outside-the-box types. This message/mantra is adhered to by the Apple community.
• A high quality API makes a big difference. I won’t assert that Apple’s API is better than Microsoft’s but I will assert that it is far better than anything on Linux. Instead of wasting cycles in trying to invent wheels, Apple developers are free to invent sleek enclosures for their 100mpg automobiles. Maybe that’s a bad metaphor, but the point should be clear.
• Hardware consistency further reduces developer headaches and extends creativity into new dimensions. This is the biggest point of the three, in my opinion. When development isn’t hamstrung by having to consider the lowest common denominator, truly interesting steps can be taken in development. Consider as an example Delicious Library, linked above. Now that most Apple computers being sold include a built in iSight camera, the developers at Delicious Monster could be free to think of innovative uses for those cameras. The result is software that enables a bar-code scanner through the camera that then allows users to catalogue their books, music, movies and more, simply by holding things up to the camera. iAlertU is another example of an interesting application that is only possible with a cohesive hardware platform.

Taking variables out of any equation makes the equation easier to solve. When you remove hardware variations, API variations, environment variations, etc., the problem of how to make things “Just Work” becomes a lot easier.

With fewer hurdles and roadblocks in place, Apple developers are free to explore creative ideas and options, options that aren’t necessarily out of reach on other platforms but are prohibitively complex or would reach a statistically insignificant portion of a diverse user base. Consider that point - even though by most measures Apple only controls 4-5% of the consumer computer market, the remaining ~90% of Windows based PCs are composed of such diverse components, in such innumerably complex configurations, that the ability to reach large portions of the market requires that developers for that platform not push any technological boundaries. The incredible diversity of the PC, a strength on one hand, becomes a liability with regard to innovation.

I’m trying to figure out the Apple formula. And of course I’m going to succeed where so many other have failed because I’m brilliant.

This is part one of I don’t know how many entries. We’ll see how many interesting things I can think of to write about. Without further ado:

Point 1 - Apple makes big, dramatic moves, not small ones.
Apple has regularly scheduled events where it can unveil and show off new hardware and software to its community. In doing so Apple might skip an incremental step or two in the hardware delivery schedule, but in return Apple gets to trumpet dramatic gains in power and capability on a regular basis. Steve Jobs gets to stand in front of the thongs and declare that the “deltas” clearly show 4.2x the performance of the previous generation! to which there is, of course, delirious cheering. Contrast this with muted press releases from other manufactures informing the public that they have indeed adopted the latest chip or technology from brand X. Yawn, the public comes to expect such things from commodity manufacturers.

It was interesting to note that Apple compared the new Mac Pro to a machine that Dell was already shipping when the Mac Pro was introduced at WWDC 2006 - configured almost exactly the same. This means that Dell had beaten Apple to market with a machine that was the equivalent of the Apple state-of-the-art. But who was paying attention to Dell? Nobody. I think this is a significant point, and shows how a steady incremental release cycle can cause speculation and enthusiasm about products, speculation and enthusiasm that is somewhat blind to reality. Well, let me caveat that previous sentence by acknowledging that the speculation builds only in the environment of secrecy that Apple is so famous for, which brings us to:

Point 2 - Apple develops its products in secret
Speculation is fun. We all guessed (or took more active measures) about what we were getting for Christmas because there’s something thrilling/aggravating about not knowing. Speculation allows us to scratch the itch of not knowing.

Combine the desire to speculate about what Apple is going to do next with a world/Internet that is rife with (wasted) talent and you have some pretty amazing results. These three videos are a good example of what enthusiasts can do to help a brand be even more hip than it already is.

So Apple encourages speculation by developing in long cycles and in secret. Of course, if Apple were making shoddy products that lacked any sort of sex appeal they wouldn’t have any amateur/enthusiast mind share anyway, which brings us to:

Point 3 - Longer cycles lead to better design.
Given a longer period between updates of hardware, more thought and care can be devoted to the design and presentation of the hardware - ie the form and function. I think this is underestimated by other manufacturers. If you’ve got to be one of the first out the door with a PC that integrates a new chip or device, how much time can you spend “tuning” the enclosures and other elements of your product to specifically suit the components? I’d say not much.

This is evidenced by the clunky huge boxes that are being shipped by most manufacturers - these boxes are being built to handle contingencies - and not Build-to-Order contingencies, but the type of contingency that shows uncertainty about what sort of thermal footprint a processor will leave or uncertainty about the task the product will perform. Given these uncertainties manufacturers simply allow for pretty much anything in the case. Vanilla, one-size-fits-all products are okay for some, but they don’t build excitement and they certainly don’t make an experience.

Apple can go in another direction entirely. By designing for purposes/markets/demographics they can make machines whose form is tied to function very tightly. In not trying to be everything to everybody Apple gets to design different and better hardware. They get to spend more time understanding their target audience given their long release cycles and then they get to spend more time making products suited to their audience. The iMac and the mini are perfect examples of this.

So there’s three observations down. I have a few more that I’ll share later, and then I’ll deliver my conclusion that reveals what my Utopian view of hardware actually is.

I’m going to take a big turn away from police monkeys for a little bit and share with you some of my serious thinkings.

Apple Computer occupies a fair portion of my computer related day dreaming. There’s a lot about Apple to like. One of the things that fascinates me most about Apple is how a company that’s so large and… corporate, can brand itself as such a stylish maverick in spite of itself. It’s all a marketing ploy, and it’s perfectly demonstrated by the Get a Mac campaign.

Whatever - it works is the point that I’m making here. Steve Jobs has his famous reality distortion field that extends out weeks ahead of any of the Mac World or WWDC events and, instead of people becoming conscious of the spin and resisting it, throngs have made the choice - in the face of clever phrases - to buy into the Apple experience. The experience factor is key here.

You see, nobody else sells an experience. Dell doesn’t sell an “experience”. The closest Dell ever got to having a corporate experience was the awful, “Dude, you’re getting a Dell,” campaign. HP does sell an experience, but the children must leave the room in order for us to speak of it. We don’t use such language around tender ears.

(Based on zero science, let alone research, I present to you the websites of the top PC manufacturers, plus Apple. This begins the survey of how the experience differs between retailers. Apple Dell HP eMachines Gateway)

Anyway, I want to believe that a satisfying computer owning experience can exist, in a mainstream manufacturer, outside of Apple. I’m not saying that I want Apple to be replaced by anybody - I just don’t want Apple to be the only company that makes a quality product that demands attention and desire in consumers.

(Note that I discount Alienware and FalconNW and the other “boutique” manufacturers here - sorry guys, but you’ll have to admit you’ve positioned yourself out of the mainstream)

So what makes the Apple experience so Apple? I don’t know for sure, but I have some thoughts. I’m going to share those thoughts over a few posts, after which I shall build to the big climax of it all - My Utopian View (Of Hardware).