Dell it seems has made some rather big decisions in the last few weeks. Dell is one of those computer companies you don’t hear about all year but then when they make the headlines it normally has big implications.
Let’s be very honest, their tablets were nothing short of a disaster. Battery life was not great and the products struggled to capture the imagination of the tablet happy consumer. This leaves me thinking that their decision to pull their new Dell Streak from the market was a good one. Dell did not capitalize on being the first major manufacturer using the Android operating system. The jury is still out on whether they continue in the tablet space.
The biggest announcement from Dell is that they are discontinuing the manufacturer of netbook laptops . Am I surprised? Not really as netbooks are increasingly under pressure from tablets and also from a new subset of notebooks called Ultrabooks. The “Ultrabook” is a notebook similar in characteristics to those seen in Apple MacBook Air. In layman’s terms it is a powerful spec’d notebook in a small form factor.
Dell’s decision I think is a precursor to what will be happening in the computing environment in 2012. Manufacturers who have not had all the success like Apple with tablets will be re-evaluating their own efforts and potentially be putting resources in other places (Ultrabooks and pure notebooks).
So Acer, Asus, HP what do you think? Will you also be re-evaluating your netbook program?
