| Date | Sat, 22 Feb 2003 11:56:42 -0800 | From | Larry McVoy <> | Subject | Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call |
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On Sat, Feb 22, 2003 at 11:42:55AM -0800, Martin J. Bligh wrote: > >> Dell makes money on many things other than thin-margin PCs. And lo' > > > > Dell's revenue is 53/29/18% desktop/notebook/server; > > 80% of US sales are to businesses. their annual report doesn't > > break out service revenue. > > Interesting. Given the profit margins involved, I bet they still > make more money on servers than desktops and notebooks combined > (the annual report doesn't seem to list that). And that's before > you take account of the "linux weighting" on top of that ...
Err, here's a news flash. Dell has just one server with more than 4 CPUS and it tops out at 8. Everything else is clusters. And they call any machine that doesn't have a head a server, they have servers starting $299. Yeah, that's right, $299.
http://www.dell.com/us/en/bsd/products/series_pedge_servers.htm
How much do you want to bet that more than 95% of their server revenue comes from 4CPU or less boxes? I wouldn't be surprised if it is more like 99.5%. And you can configure yourself a pretty nice quad xeon box for $25K. Yeah, there is some profit in there but nowhere near the huge margins you are counting on to make your case. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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