Dell says it's ‘no longer a PC company,’ focusing on enterprise
Dell looks like it's going to be shifting its focus to enterprise and away from consumer PCs. Brad Anderson, president of Dell's enterprise group, said today that “we're no longer a PC company, we're an IT company,” according to PC Pro.
Context & Ripple Effects
This declaration is the public endpoint of a pivot Michael Dell has been signaling for months: he told the WSJ in April 2011 that he was looking beyond the PC business, and enterprise chief Brad Anderson's 'we're an IT company' line now makes that official positioning rather than aspiration. It follows a string of consumer retreats — exiting netbooks in December 2011, expressing disappointment with Android ahead of a Windows 8 tablet push, and thin laptops that drew criticism for price and battery life.
The framing matters because Dell's board has kept going private on the table since late 2010, and a company recast around enterprise IT is easier to value and restructure away from quarterly PC volume scrutiny. The story traveled unusually widely for an executive quote — pickups across TechCrunch, Business Insider, VentureBeat, PC Pro and others — suggesting the market read it as a strategic marker, not spin.
First-order effects
- Dell's consumer PC lines become portfolio maintenance rather than strategy: expect resources to shift toward servers, storage and services under Anderson's enterprise group, while consumer hardware rides on upcoming Windows 8 devices instead of new investment.
- Rivals reading the same margin math — HP most directly — face pressure to answer whether they too are consumer PC companies or IT companies, forcing a positioning decision Dell has just made first.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise hardware and services vendors (IBM, HP's enterprise arm, Oracle post-Sun) gain a more aggressive competitor bidding for corporate refresh budgets, which should compress pricing in mid-market server and services deals.
- Component suppliers and ODMs built around Dell's consumer volumes see order mix tilt toward enterprise SKUs, raising the stakes of every PC maker's tablet-and-Windows-8 bet as the consumer floor shrinks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the branded-PC industry splits structurally into enterprise infrastructure firms that tolerate PCs as legacy channels and consumer device specialists — with 'IT company' becoming the required identity for anyone selling to CIOs.
- A Dell organized around enterprise services is a candidate for ownership restructuring — take-private or major M&A — because its valuation no longer depends on defending low-margin consumer share.
The trend: Legacy PC makers are rebranding themselves as enterprise IT companies as consumer hardware margins compress, with each announcement pressuring the rest of the industry to pick a side.