Company may not have the most exciting products, but they sell, writes Karlin Lillington, in Cannes
It must be nice to be Dell. Its results remain formidably positive - which makes running through the latest figures a rather pleasant task for executives.
Number one worldwide in desktop sales and in workstation sales; number one in servers in the US, China and Japan; and number four in storage but moving up - Mr Neil Hand, director, worldwide enterprise market for Dell, ticks off the scorecard.
Worldwide revenue for the past four quarters is a staggering $43.5 billion (€35.8 billion).
"We think we're giving our customers what they want," says Mr Jeff Kimbell, director, corporate products for Dell EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).
"Ultimately, our customers are voting with their purchasing power," according to Mr Kimbell.
The men kicked off two days of product demonstrations, industry overviews and advanced peeks at new products in the pipeline for industry journalists (battened down under firm non-disclosure agreements; but suffice it to say that there's nothing coming this summer that would scare the horses or the punters, but quite a few things that might make them flex their credit cards).
In some ways, Dell's success is a mystery. It makes neither the sexiest, the cheapest nor the most cutting-edge PCs. There's nowhere for customers to go to look at them - you buy online after clicking through the bits you want - although there's plenty of encouragement to make their lives easy by purchasing a set package, always at attention-getting prices.
But that, of course, is a great deal of Dell's success. You get comfortable, attractive designs but nothing too overly edgy - except in its new high-end gaming PC line, the Dimension XPS, which has glowing lights of your colour choice behind the front grille - a feature that gets Dell management unexpectedly excited.
It's easy to buy a Dell and you can see what you are getting. It arrives quickly and comes at a good price - at quite a good price if you opt for one of the specials.
On the company's side, it's come up with an incredibly fast just-in-time turnaround on the building process so that inventory hardly spends any time at all as inventory. Parts are always on the go and PCs are shipped out immediately.
Technicians can put your whole box together in minutes - rather depressing when it takes you two hours to figure out how to add in some additional memory or change a sound card.
Mr Kimbell notes that the company is organised not around product lines but market segments, which allows Dell to keep a tight focus on what those segments want now, and what they might want next.
Right now, the company sees what Intel and Microsoft (who also made presentations in Cannes) are seeing - a push towards the digital home and digital office. Rather than desktop PCs in isolation, both home and office computer users are expected to be hubs of digital activity.
"Everything is moving digital," according to Mr Erik Steeb, Intel's Director of Marketing for Europe, Middle East and Africa. "The growth of digital devices now far outpaces their analogue counterparts."
Intel and Microsoft argue that they still see the PC, rather than some sort of console device, as the centre of this hub, which can manage music, video, mail, files, pictures, documents, television and wireless networks.
That, of course, is what Dell is counting on. The company has recently introduced its own basic media management software, called the Dell Media Experience, which Dell personnel insist is not a rival to Microsoft's Media Player or RealPlayer, but a stripped down media management tool to get home users started with playing with media on their PCs.
Dell, of course, has also recently begun offering an MP3 music player, which connects right up to the digital home scenario, and is busy expanding its range of Axim handhelds (three new slimline models were launched into the European market at Cannes, featuring both wireless and Bluetooth connectivity).
A new departure for the company in the past year is printers - again, at aggressive prices, including a home laser printer just introduced in Europe at €199 (a version that can be networked is €239).
The printers are produced through partnerships with manufacturers such as Xerox/Fujitsu and Lexmark, and Dell has already begun to take some market share in the segment ruled by rival HP. Apparently founder Mr Michael Dell has said that his biggest regret in running Dell was not to get into the printer market a decade ago.
But it is in notebook PCs - or the "mobility" sector - that Dell and other manufacturers such as HP and Apple are seeing strongest demand.
Mr Kimbell describes the segment as having "explosive growth", with analysts IDC believing the segment will grow at three times the rate of the desktop market between 2002-2007.
Coupled with a 40 per cent compound annual growth rate in wireless network infrastructure through 2008 and Intel's focus on building wireless enhancements into its chips, companies such as Dell and Microsoft see the notion of the digital, networked, wireless home and office finally becoming more than a keynote speech aspiration over the next year or two.
