Dell says PC market not dead

Dell’s founder and CEO Michael Dell says there is still “big room” for the PC, despite the invasion of tablets and cloud computing, which caused HP to retreat from the market last month.

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Speaking at Cloudforce 2011 in London, Dell said that his company, which is now the biggest global PC maker by market share, is set to prosper following HP’s withdrawal from the market.

Commenting on HP’s decision to cease building hardware, Dell said: “Sometimes the ball bounces in your direction, this is one of those things that happened to us to which we had no control over.”

He added that Dell’s strategy is “very different” to HP’s and that the company has already branched out to provide “solutions” to customers’ problems, rather than just selling hardware.

“There are three parts to our industry: hardware, software and services. Software is great, but you have to run it on something. We do believe the value will shift to software services but even as it evolves hardware won’t go away,” he said.

Dell added that there is still “big room for the device”.

“Gartner says there will be 2 billion PCs [in use] by 2014. They are at the front end of the productivity environment, even though you see two to three other devices, you’ll also see PCs,” he said.

Worldwide, 364 million PCs are due to be shipped in 2011, up 3.8% on 2010, according to Gartner.

HP is spinning off its computer hardware and mobile division to concentrate on business and cloud computing, which is it sees as a more profitable investment than PCs, smartphones and tablets.

The company is currently bidding to takeover software giant Autonomy for £6.7bn, although it has had to extend its deadline for the merger after fewer than half of the Autonomy’s shareholders approved the bid.

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