Dude, you're getting a cash register...from Dell
A great David Kilpatrick column on Dell in Fortune. According to him the recent news that Dell has started selling cash registers should not have come as any surprise:
I asked President Kevin Rollins, who jointly runs the company with CEO Michael Dell, what was least understood about Dell. His answer: "People have to understand the value of the model [Dell's business model] and the sustainability of it. There is a nearly unlimited list of products to which it could be applied."
"There are millions of industry-standard products - just march through every consumer electronic profit pool, corporate electronics, services. We represent in the PC space something like 14% of the total information technology spend from corporations and individuals. That leaves a lot of room for us to grow. You've got software and services and many, many hardware devices -- even things like cell phones and cameras and video recorders. It just goes on and on and on -- projectors, new handhelds...Every day there's a new viable product category. People sometimes say that Dell's growth is going to start coming to an end, but there is a resilience here that people keep missing."