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About this siteFor six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul Monday, December 22, 2003Why Dell is kicking ass and taking namesA few months back, I wrote an article about Dell ("Inside Dell") that explained why this often-misunderstood company is so successful. To the paranoid Apple community, Dell is The Devil (tm), a company that doesn't innovate but instead low-balls its pricing in a predatory, Microsoft-like manner. Nothing could be further from the truth: Dell spends over $450 million a year on research and development and owns a huge amount of patents. But what really separates Dell from Apple is Dell's pragmatic approach to business: It's more concerned with the bottom line, and what it's customers want, than on trendy, niche concerns like, say, whether the blue plastic bezels on the second-generation iMac all look exactly the same color. Apple is all about style, and certainly, they're very successful at that. But Dell delivers the goods. In a Knight Ridder examination of Dell, we learn more about this pragmatic approach, where "innovation comes in the form of a pop-up window that appears on a computer screen when your printer runs low on ink. Just click on a button and a new Dell ink cartridge lands on your front porch within 24 hours. It's not cutting-edge technology, but it is a smart, consumer-friendly feature sure to please customers who dread trekking down to Office Depot with a spent cartridge in hand." Dell CEO Michael Dell also has some pragmatic advice about innovation: "If you invent something that no one wants to buy, I don't care," he says "We didn't grow to be a $40 billion company in 19 years by trying to do everything ourselves. I don't want to reinvent things I can get from someone else." [ Posted at 8:53 AM | Permalink ]
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