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QOTD: Just Shut It Down and Give The Money Back to The Shareholders, Right?

March 30, 2011 at 6:50 am PT

“I couldn’t be happier that Apple has created a market and built up enthusiasm but longer term, open, capable and affordable will win, not closed, high price and proprietary. Apple is great if you’ve got a lot of money and live on an island. It’s not so great if you have to exist in a diverse, open, connected enterprise; simple things become quite complex.”

– Andy Lark, Dell’s global head of marketing for large enterprises and public organizations, on Apple and the iPad’s role in enterprise

Tagged with: Apple, Dell, digital, John Paczkowski, QOTD, quoted, shorty

comments so far. Add yours.

Anonymous

Dell is now taking the lead from Microsoft in the “Stupid Corporate Quote of the Day from Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer. On the other hand, Steve has said so many stupid things over the years that he will surely best Lark again soon.
Anonymous

Yeah, that Windows just completely BOMBED in the market and everybody went Linux, right? Right?
Anonymous

Andy Lark in talks-shit shock. Wasn’t he at Sun? Look how that worked out.
Anonymous

Picture a group of cavemen trying to understand an iPad, standing around it, confused, grunting, scratching their heads. Then picture of group of I-T people trying to understand an iPad, and they do the exact same thing!

I’m not going to miss Dell as it sinks into the tar pit.
http://blog.macb.net macbeach

I don’t personally know anyone who is excited about getting the latest version of Windows. Seven is succeeding partially because so many people have hung onto their XP machines for so long until the hardware is falling apart. This has hurt the hardware vendors too.

Most people using Windows these days are doing so because they depend on one key package that only runs there. Those days are coming to a close.

I predicted many years ago that the Windows vs Linux (or OS X) “wars” would be rendered moot by a combination of appliance and cloud computing. It’s happening.
perrelet

It’s never a good idea to start with a bald-faced lie. It makes everything that comes after seem a little suspect. I would imagine that Andy would be a lot happier if it was Dell that had “created a market and built up enthusiasm”, etc. It all comes down to whether your product works or not. Cheap junk is still junk. People will pay for quality.
Anonymous

Hey, Andy: does Dell plan to knowingly put bad capacitors in its tablets, like you did in desktops? I guess Dell is great if you are poor and live in a dumpster.
Anonymous

Nobody is excited *now* about getting the latest version of Windows, but people sure as hell were excited about it a decade and a half ago. Remember the Windows 95 launch?

What you’re really illustrating is that a paradigm shift is underway in computing, where our machine’s capabilities are no longer defined primarily by local resources but by how they interact with remote ones. All that does is serve to underscore how historical trends about Windows vs Linux vs OS X are not relevant to the emerging mobile marketplace, because the contexts are radically different.

But my point was that “open” here was a smokescreen. Given a computing contexts, users don’t intrinsically prioritize “open,” however you choose to define it. They prioritize efficiency, ease of use and interoperability with peers. (In the desktop era interoperability mean running the same software on the same OS; in the internet era it means more of ability to access the same web apps and services.)

We don’t disagree (I haven’t owned a Windows PC since 2005). My wording just led you to believe I was saying something different than I’m actually saying.