Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 22 Feb 2003 08:29:34 -0800 | From | "Martin J. Bligh" <> | Subject | Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call |
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> That's all handwaving and has no meaning without numbers. I could care less > if Dell has 99.99% margins on their servers, if they only sell $50M of servers > a quarter that is still less than 10% of their quarterly profit. > > So what are the actual *numbers*? Your point makes sense if and only if > people sell lots of server. I spent a few minutes in google: world wide > server sales are $40B at the moment. The overwhelming majority of that > revenue is small servers. Let's say that Dell has 20% of that market, > that's $2B/quarter. Now let's chop off the 1-2 CPU systems. I'll bet > you long long odds that that is 90% of their revenue in the server space. > Supposing that's right, that's $200M/quarter in big iron sales. Out of > $8000M/quarter. > > I'd love to see data which is different than this but you'll have a tough > time finding it. More and more companies are looking at the cost of > big iron and deciding it doesn't make sense to spend $20K/CPU when they > could be spending $1K/CPU. Look at Google, try selling them some big > iron. Look at Wall Street - abandoning big iron as fast as they can.
But we're talking about linux ... and we're talking about profit, not revenue. I'd guess that 99% of their desktop sales are for Windows. And I'd guess they make 100 times as much profit on a big server as they do on a desktop PC.
Would be nice if someone had real numbers, but I doubt they're published except in non-free corporate research reports.
M.
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