MENLO PARK, Calif. (CNN/Money) -
Dell, the computer company, does a nice job of cultivating an image of being warm and cuddly. The image is helped along by the smiling visage of the company's chairman, Michael Dell.
When the company's not being warm and fuzzy, however, it's gotten really good at being mean.
Is that a bad thing? No way. Business isn't about making friends. It's about winning, fair and square. Perhaps no technology company is better at it than Dell.
Exhibit A is Dell's exquisite timing last month in introducing a round of price cuts. There's nothing unusual about price cuts in the PC industry. Dell's just happened to come the day after HP announced that it had botched its most recent quarter, sending its stock price downward.
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Exhibit B is the way Dell is slapping around Sun Microsystems. A recent Dell ad aimed at business customers boasted that a Dell server running Linux software and using an Intel processor was 89 percent faster and 39 percent less expensive than a comparable Sun box running its own chips.
Nasty? Yeah. Accurate? Yep. Devastating for Sun? You bet.
Exhibit C is just getting underway. Dell has been hinting for weeks that it's about to get into the television business, perhaps starting with flat-panel TVs. Do you think Sony, Samsung and Sharp might be a little nervous about this turn of events?
Come to think of it, Dell is looking more and more like Wal-Mart, a notoriously cold-hearted competitor. Dell doesn't fall in love with products, it just sells them. And at lower prices than its competitors, if possible.
As a company Dell clearly is a fan of the late, great baseball manager Leo Durocher who said "Nice guys finish last."
Microsoft not a software-only company anymore?
I made a reference here the other day to the largest software-only companies, a list that excludes IBM.
Big Blue hates being excluded from those lists because its software division, at $13 billion in revenue in 2002, easily is the second largest after Microsoft. But that's just 16 percent of IBM's roughly $80 billion in total revenue (which includes the services business).
Quickly came a comment from a correspondent within IBM wondering if it's still accurate to call Microsoft a software-only company.
After all, for its fiscal 2003, Mr. Softee got $2.7 billion of revenue (8 percent of its total) from its home and entertainment division, much of which is attributed to X-box, its video hardware and software business. Then again, that unit suffered $924 million in operating losses.
So here's a suggestion: Once X-box accounts for more than 20 percent of Microsoft's revenue and makes money, then we should re-visit the notion of whether or not Microsoft is only a software company.
Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.
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