[lmg643]

I totally disagree on the "professional manager" - that's what ballmer was. and this is coming from someone who thinks ballmer is unfairly criticized.

(eg - what google and apple unleashed on the world in the past 10 years was a major historical shift - coming from product/technical people at their core. arguably, this shift was one that only a newbie or outsider could pull off. 20/20 hindsight to say "microsoft could have dominated those arenas" when they had so many other verticals of strength to tend to. (and 20/20 hindsight for me to say this as well...))

IMHO microsoft needs to keep focusing on hacker-friendliness - they have a great lock on the corporate world, but the corporate world is starting to look to the hacker community for direction.

what do i mean by this?

big companies can't be trusted to just get brand loyalty and keep buying your stuff until they go out of business. look at RIM - Blackberries were mandatory company accessories, now it is BYOD. Look at the server market - the biggest consumers of servers (FB, GOOG) are using designs they made themselves. Tougher for Dell and HP to keep selling ready-made servers. How long before other major corporations are doing the same?

the enterprise market is more tech savvy than times past, and only getting more so. high-level technical creativity and intuitive understanding of product potential is vital.

[gtirloni]

I always thought the amount FB/GOOG spend on servers is a tiny fraction, when compared to the sum of what all the other companies in the world spend. Do you have a source where I can verify this claim that Dell/HP are having a hard with their server divisions because FB/GOOG isn't buying from them?

This is a honest question as I often am not aware of the whole picture (and have a hard time picking the right sources for that kind of information -- not sure who to trust in a marketing war).

[cwp]

The GP isn't arguing that Dell/HP are hurting because they lost their biggest customers. It argues that they're at risk of losing many customers in the future, because enterprise IT departments will emulate Facebook and Google.

[gtirloni]

If that is his argument, then I think it's wrong. Small and medium business will never do that for sure. They don't have the knowledge, resources or anything. The ROI is nonexistent for them.

Even for big corporation, what would be a good number of servers for them to reach a critical mass where it is worth keeping all those HW engineers and increased support staff? They want to sign a contract, get regular supported servers, with warranty, etc, and focus on their core business. They get it from the regular folks of HP, Dell, IBM, etc.

Of course there are exceptions but are they numerous enough to say Dell and HP are doomed? I hardly think so. Corporations in HPC market might take a stab at creating something like this. The folks running app/DB/web/whatnot servers for ERP, financial, etc applications?

Anyway, I feel like the OP is exaggerating a bit.

[deegles]

Interesting that you bring this up the day after Microsoft donates a bunch of server designs to the Open Compute Project. I definitely think that hybrid cloud approaches will squeeze out middlemen like HP and Dell. OEMs and customers are going to be the big winners here.