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Dell Computers

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During the past the five years, Michael Dell, CEO of Dell Inc, has re-engineered his corporate strategy in order to regain lost market share. The firm once dominated the computer market with a successful business model focused on direct-order customization and supply chain efficiencies. This cost efficient strategy provided them with an imitation resistant competitive advantage. However, their current downfall can be correlated to both external industry disruptions and internal missteps. The dynamics of long term success within the computer industry is the ability to become intertwined with Moore’s Law. This industry disruption states that “chip performance per dollar doubles every 18 months.” (Gallaugher, 64) Dell’s cost efficient strategy neglected threats of Moore’s Law and only concentrated on operational effectiveness of their direct-orders rather than strategic positioning. Dell’s competitors, Hewlett Packard and Apple, were able to position their highly elastic products to their end consumers at profitable distribution channels. They were also able to duplicate Dell’s successful online direct- order model, which provided more options for consumers. The consumers buying power quickly became stronger with price transparency over the internet. Dell Computers’ poor internal decision making has impaired the company from significantly increasing their profits. For several years, Dell decided not to acquire any other technology company while competitors negotiated terms of agreements. They also provided insufficient resources for their customer service, which diminished their brand loyalty within the market. Furthermore, the biggest internal misstep was the negligence of management for not seeing the trend of computers being fashionable to individual consumers. “Dell thinks about their offerings as microprocessors, disk drives and frames-per-second graphics. But

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