PC maker rediscovers PC market
Wall Street types are worried because Michael Dell's company hasn't delivered the new music player that had been in the works for the holiday shopping season. The launch has been canceled, says an anonymous insider. That's the best news I've heard from Dell in a long time. Here's why.Competing with Apple on the iPod front seems like a Formula for Fail. My guess is Dell made an honest effort to develop an iPod competitor, then killed the expensive marketing campaign and production run after deciding that they'd built another Zune. Dell has also fallen behind on its downsized-laptop "netbooks", which have neither the power of a full-size notebook nor the portability of an iPhone. Why bother? The biggest segment of the consumer electronics market is still standard-size notebook computers. Dell has fallen from No. 1 to No. 3 position in sales, but that's still a lot of sales. Instead of diluting the company's resources across smaller, trendier markets, it seems more sensible for Dell to refocus on its core product, the cheap-but-impressive PC. Hey, I'd buy one. (Photo by AP/Manish Swarup)