Acer ultrapassa Dell

A Acer, de Taiwan, ultrapassou a Dell e se tornou a segunda maior fabricante mundial de computadores no terceiro trimestre, enquanto as vendas mundiais do setor se provaram surpreendentemente fortes, alimentando as esperanças de que a demanda esteja se recuperando.

As vendas mundiais de computadores pessoais cresceram em 2,3 por cento no terceiro trimestre, para 78,1 milhões de unidades, enquanto o setor continuava sua gradual recuperação, com todas as regiões, exceto o Japão, atingindo ou superando as expectativas de vendas, de acordo com o grupo de pesquisa IDC.

A IDC havia previsto uma queda de 2,9 por cento no volume.

Os analistas afirmam que a política de preços agressiva adotada pela Acer e pela maior fabricante mundial de computadores, a Hewlett-Packard, e a boa demanda dos consumidores ajudaram as duas empresas a conquistar mercado, enquanto a Dell, dependente da demanda empresarial, continuou a cair no ranking mundial.

As vendas da HP cresceram em 9,3 por cento, segundo a IDC, e elevaram sua participação no setor a 20,2 por cento. A HP ultrapassou a Dell e passou a liderar o mercado em 2006, e vem ampliando sua participação durante toda a crise.

A Acer se beneficiou da popularidade dos netbooks, laptops baratos e sem luxos cuja função básica é navegar na Web. O grupo manteve sua ascensão meteórica, com alta de 25,6 por cento nas vendas, o que o conduziu ao segundo lugar com fatia de mercado de 14 por cento.

A Acer, fundada nos anos 1980 por Stan Shih, um empresário de Taiwan, começou a operar como fornecedora de componentes eletrônicos e cimentou sua entrada no segmento de computadores ao adquirir a divisão de computadores portáteis da Texas Instrumentos, no final dos anos 90.

Nos últimos anos, a Acer adquiriu as fabricantes de computadores Gateway e Packard-Bell, expandindo dramaticamente sua presença no mercado dos Estados Unidos e reduzindo a distância que a separa da HP e da Dell.

Colaboração de Fernando Bamberg @flickr.com/bamberg86

S AAPL

This is kind of a joint post between Mike and myself, as we have both sold Apple (AAPL) in the last week (although he did get a slightly better price, and he sold a partial position while I offloaded it all) after having some discussions about the stock.

Our thought process was very fundamental, and it revolved around the question: what isn’t priced into the stock?  There is no bad news surrounding AAPL right now.  Any thoughts that they, being a manufacturer of premium products, would be struck down by the recession have been quelled as they rolled out earnings numbers that almost defied belief.  The myth that without Steve Jobs the company would be a body with no head has been squashed, as they performed admirably during the health-related absence of their CEO. They continue to excite and amaze the population with relatively minor and incremental upgrades to their products, due to the strength of their existing market position and their incredible marketing abilities.  And finally, the ever-persistent rumors about a tablet or touchscreen notepad-like product have reached the pinnacle as analysts expect a product arriving early next year that will energize that dormant segment like they did the music and mobile phone industries.

As I said before, there seems to be no bad news priced in, but I see a few dark clouds on the horizon. Windows 7 is arriving soon, and is supposed to be the first product from Microsoft (MSFT) that can truly compete with OS X.  Unlike their other industries, AAPL does not enjoy a strong market position in the PC field, and so have to rely on slick marketing to win customers. Their main message recently has essentially been “Windows sucks, OS X doesn’t,” and when that goes away, what do their marketers fall back on? This new tablet concept hasn’t materialized in the years that the rumors have persisted, but it appears that it is for real this time. But what if it flops? This is highly speculative, but if AAPL has a very high profile failure on their hands (much bigger than the Apple TV), the stench may flow to their other offerings and wake people up to their competitors products (such as the much improved Microsoft Zune HD, or the new premium Dell laptops (DELL)).

AAPL is about 5% below its all time, intra-day high of approximately 202.98.  That price was reached in December 2007, just before the financial crisis really took hold of the markets.  At that point, there were equally no reservations among analysts that AAPL was going to the moon. It was after that point that doubts began materializing.

We expect AAPL to perform well, and we aren’t calling a top on AAPL. However, until we see a catalyst for growth materialize, we do not anticipate their stock outperforming the market, making other places to put capital more appealing.

Disclosure: No position in AAPL or DELL, Long MSFT

Adamo, "To fall in love with". Check it out!

No, I’m not being a soppy git – although always subject to change.

Dell’s AdamoXPS (’Adamo’ apparently derived from the Latin “to fall in love with” – I live and learn every day!) looks pretty amazing – so much so that whilst I’ve not got a great deal to say about it until they send me one to play with (ever hopeful) that I thought I’d give you a peek at what I mean – check out the images below!

Which way up?

Skinny! 9.99MM!

If you’d like to to sign up to receive some more info, click the following Dell Link here.

Article 3: Dell and salesforce.com Launch Cloud Compting Offerings for SMBs

Hmmm….is this a case of beauty and the beast? That is – on-premises paradigms marrying cloud-based solutions? The Odd Couple redux? Time will tell for sure but in the “truth is stranger than fiction department” I present to you BREAKING NEWS from Dell and salesforce.com. The net-net is that Dell is offering salesforce “certified” solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs). As you know, I am a huge fan of CRM and the power of sales force management, so this news was especially interesting to me and I felt a strong need to share it.

The big question of the day: how will the SMB channel partner make money from this endeavor?

cheers…harrybbbb

Dell and salesforce.com Launch Cloud Computing Offerings for SMBs

ROUND ROCK, Texas–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) and salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM), the enterprise cloud computing company, today announced the availability of new certified Dell-salesforce.com solutions, joint offerings for small and medium businesses (SMBs), that deliver customer relationship management (CRM) applications via the cloud.

These solutions will allow small and medium businesses in the United States to manage their people and processes more efficiently by deploying sales force automation and CRM across their businesses. The joint offerings require no incremental hardware or software to install or maintain, and customers will be able to manage all their customer information, activities, and conversations, with subscription based pricing starting from $9 per user per month. SMBs can get started today at http://www.dell.com/crm.

“Dell and salesforce.com are providing customers with an integrated and proven solution that we have been testing extensively in our own organizations,” said Steve Felice, president of Dell’s global small and medium-sized business operations. “Today, salesforce.com runs its datacenters and PCs on Dell equipment and Dell has integrated Salesforce CRM with our on-premise applications using Dell’s PowerEdge servers and Dell Integration Services,” he added.

“Our work with Dell opens up a whole new world for small and mid-sized businesses, empowering them to harness the power of cloud computing without the cost and complexity of managing infrastructure,” said George Hu, executive vice president, marketing and alliances, salesforce.com. “Working with Dell will help accelerate the adoption of cloud computing by SMBs worldwide.”

According to technology analyst firm Gartner, SaaS-based software models will represent the area of growth for applications over the next five years for midsize businesses, anticipating a compound annual growth rate of 29.1% through 2013 in North America*. The certified Dell-salesforce.com solution addresses critical integration issues between applications, thereby reducing IT costs for SMBs.

For growing businesses with more complex IT environments, the Dell–salesforce.com solutions also offer the expertise of Dell Integration Services, which provide fixed low cost, quick migration and integration for businesses with the salesforce.com Sales Cloud.

This out-of-the-box integration solution for SMBs was born and road-tested by Dell’s SMB team within the company, and helps SMBs easily and painlessly integrating cloud technology into their IT environments without disrupting their business processes.

SMB Success in the Cloud with Dell and salesforce.com – How it Works

Joint Dell and salesforce.com sales teams will introduce these solutions to existing and prospective small and medium customers, with salesforce.com providing the CRM solution and Dell providing integration and migration services, where needed.

The Dell–salesforce.com offerings include:

• Salesforce Contact Manager Edition – Contact Manager Edition works with any email application including Outlook and Gmail, and provides a cloud-based contact management application for 1-2 users to store contacts, track customers, run activity reports, manage tasks and meetings, and more. A free six month subscription to Contact Manager Edition is available as an exclusive to customers of Dell Vostro laptops and desktops.
• Salesforce Group Edition – Group Edition provides basic CRM for small groups up to five users. Group Edition features Salesforce for Google AdWords, includes all the Contact Manager features and also allows users to track sales opportunities, run sales reports and real-time dashboards.
• Salesforce Professional Edition – delivers a complete picture of your customer interactions. It includes everything in Group Edition plus no user limit, reports and analytics, custom dashboard, sales forecasting, mobile access, and much more.
• Salesforce Enterprise Edition – Enterprise Edition provides everything in Professional Edition, plus workflow and approvals, advanced security, territory management, offline access and more, so users can customize and integrate CRM for the specific needs of their company.

The Dell–salesforce.com solutions also offer the expertise of Dell Integration Services, which provide fixed low-cost, quick, data migration and integration for businesses. Dell Integration Services are available with Salesforce Enterprise Edition for IT staff that may lack the budget or expertise to integrate existing on-premise data from an Oracle, MySQL or homegrown database with cloud computing applications such as Salesforce CRM. Dell Integration Services include:

• Dell Integration Appliance – Tested and implemented internally by Dell’s team on the company’s award winning PowerEdge servers, this out-of-the-box Salesforce CRM integrated solution provides data cleansing and migration tools, along with a library of prebuilt integration templates for connecting many commercial software-as-a-service products.
• Virtual Integration Appliance – Enables users to deploy integration appliance functionality on any hardware in their virtualized environment.
• Cloud Integration Service – Ideal for integrating Salesforce CRM with other cloud computing applications.

Organizations interested in these solutions can visit http://www.dell.com/crm. The site also has more information about Salesforce CRM and Dell Integration Services along with a free trial subscription of Salesforce CRM for Dell SMB customers.

*Source: Gartner Inc., 1 May 2009, Dataquest Insight: Top 10 Practices for Selling to SMBs in Any Economy, Joslyn Faust.

Join Dell, salesforce.com and customer SPS Commerce for a free joint Webinar on November 4, 2009 from 10 a.m. – 11 a.m. PT to showcase the benefits of Dell Salesforce Certified Solutions.

My Dell is a Dell-inquent

Dell XPS M1330 laptop

The above picture is my Dell laptop complete with missing quotation key.  Notice that the keys are a silver color and the color ON the key denoting its function is a somewhat darker grey; they are not lit in any way and so at night I need to have an overhead light shining down on the keyboard or I have to move the monitor part of the laptop such that its light shines on the keys so I can hunt down a particular key — fortunately I’m a touch typist so I don’t have to do this often, but nonetheless, to see the keys at night takes some work.  Further, what you can’t see in this picture is that the print on the E, R, N, and M key has worn off – again, it’s a good thing I’m a touch typist.  Now to add insult to injury, the power cord works intermittently and when this particular laptop goes into battery mode, the screen lighting fades to where you can hardly see the screen at all.  Add to this the issues with the Vista operating system and you may understand where I am today.  In computer Hades.

In simpler terms, I hate this laptop with every fiber of my being.  This is my third Dell; my second Dell laptop.  This one was recommended by my IT guru and I don’t blame him for the fact that this particular machine is a gigantic piece of computer crap — maybe in his capable hands it would have worked like a charm.  All I know is I paid a tremendous amount of money 2 years ago for this; the warranty has run out,  and I’m ready to chuck it out the window.

Now I use my computer every day, especially in the pursuit of my degree and also when writing this and my other blog.   The keyboard gets quite a workout so it has to be functioning well to suit my needs.   I can always order a new power cord;it’s not cheap.  There is absolutely nothing I can do about the broken quotation key except to pound my finger on the spot where the key once was which results in a series of quotation marks and I simply backspace until I have what I want.  Oh, I can replace this keyboard for about $250 but that doesn’t include installation/labor.  Pitiful, isn’t it?

So I have decided I need to find the money to buy a new laptop in the next 6 months.  The one nice feature of this laptop is it’s small and very lightweight – it’s only 12 1/2 inches wide and 8 1/2 inches deep and it weighs hardly anything at all so I can easily take it with me and I’m not lugging around 10 lbs of computer stuff on my shoulder.  That is its one saving grace – the portability.  It also has good memory and it only crashes once every week or so now.

I don’t think I’m asking too much to buy a computer that isn’t going to crash at all – ESPECIALLY when I’m trying to complete an online timed school quiz.  Gah….talk about frustrating — I’m on question 18 of a 20 question test with 15 minutes left and the computer crashes.

So…do I completely change my focus and try out a Mac?  Or should I stick with a PC and simply ditch Dell in favor of maybe HP?  I need some input from readers please.  I really want to know — what do you use and what would you all recommend I buy?   I really don’t need alot of bells and whistles; I’m not into gaming – I basically want this for school and to surf and play on Twitter and on my blogs, and to collect my pictures of EmmaLou and Devoted Spouse.

Help me please – send comments on what you like and don’t like about what you use and if I have any Mac laptop users out there please give me comments on what laptop is best for students?  I’ve heard bad stuff about the new Mac Air.  It’s getting to the point I don’t know which reviews to believe anymore and I’m just not a techhead at all!  So give me your valuable recommendations please!!

Today's Best Market Rumors (10/7/2009) (NOK)(AAPL)(JPM)(GE)(WYNN)

Updated throughout the day.

Updated 1.36 PM EST:  Pimco left the bondholders steering committee at CIT (NYSE:CIT) last month  (CNBC)

Updated 12.45 PM:  Polycom (NSADAQ:PLCM) could be taken over by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HPQ) or Dell (NASDAQ:DELL). Interdigital (NASDAQ: IDCC) could be bought by Nokia (NYSE:NOK) and ValueClick (NASDAQ:VCLK) could be taken over by any one of a number of companies.  (Barron’s)

Updated 12.41 PM:   GM head of American sales leaves amid talk that car company CFO may be next  (CNNMoney)

Update 10.50 AM EST:  Congress may pass a bill which will require that public companies split the roles of chairman and CEO.  (MarketWatch)

Thomson Reuters (NYSE:TRI) may be involved in the bidding for McGraw-Hill’s (NYSE:MHP) BusinessWeek working jointly with Zelnick Media. Strauss Zelnick is on the boards of Blockbuster (NYSE:BBI) and Take-Two Interactive (NASDAQ:TTWO)  (PaidContent).

Citigroup (NYSE:C) may sell it Philbro unit which is paying its chief $100 million  this year.  (CNBC)

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) has narrowed its list of CEOs to two people  (WSJ).

Foxconn has a deal to make 300,000 to 400,000 Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) tablet PCs to ship in Q1  (DigiTimes)

Collins Stewart believes that Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO) are on the lookout for acquisitions. (The Deal).

Share sales by Steve Wynn, head of Wynn (NASDAQ:WYNN), and his COO may be” a canary in the coal mine to other investors to take some profits on the gains in this sector since the March lows.” That would include MGM (NYSE:MGM) and Las Vegas Sands (NYSE:LVS)  (TheStreet.com)

Private equity firms Bain Capital and THL Partners are asking banks that supported their buy-out of Clear Channel Communications to help restructure the firm’s debt. Those banks include Citigroup (NYSE:C), Credit Suisse (NYSE:CS), Deutsche Bank (NYSE:DB), and Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS).  (NYPost)

News Corp (NYSE:NWS) CEO Rupert Murdoch is in Japan and South Korea and may be discussing partnerships to build a rival product to the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) Kindle.  (Reuters)

Vivendi will discuss selling its 20% stake in GE’s (NYSE:GE) NBCU at its October 19 board meeting to allow a transaction with Comcast (NADSAQ:CMCSA) which would involve the cable company getting control of media firm.  (BusinessWeek)

JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) executive  Heidi Miller could be in the running for the CEO job at Bank of America. (The Big Money)

Douglas A. McIntyre

Dell ще предлага компютрите си с 1-годишен безплатен достъп до Napster

Днес Dell и Napster сключиха сделка, според която компютърният производител ще предлага някои от продуктите си с 1-годишен безплатен достъп до ресурсите на Napster. В частност, става въпрос за моделите от линиите Dell Inspiron и Dell Studio като първите бройки с екстрата ще започнат да се предлага от следващия месец в Германия, САЩ и Великобритания. По принцип годишният абонамент за Napster струва $60, така че грубо ще спестите около 100 лева.

Източник: SlashGear