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Dell (DELL) has been losing market share in the PC industry to Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and Asia-based Lenovo and Acer. It has not been able to come up with novel machines to attract a new wave of buyers. Its earnings today are expected to be poor.

HP at least partially solved it reliance on hardware by expanding into the IT services business. Since it bought EDS, its services division has grown tremendously and has strong margins. Dell has not made anywhere near the effort that HP has to diversify away from PC and server sales.

An interesting read suggesting that the services market is crowded and that Dell might face increasing competition. But let’s not forget that Dell has the brand recognition, it’s already in the door so to speak, it might therefore not be that hard a sell to say we can provide the hardware and additional professional services. Does it need to improve it’s revenue from professional services? naturally any business needs to continue improving revenues and it needs to see what opportunities it can create in products and services.

For me though, the conversation seems like a mute point, as we move away from the enterprise customers to the small/medium business market, it is community mixed with professional services that we want to be going for. That when you buy a Dell, a Lenovo or HP laptop, that you’re eligible for their special community giving you a support portal, documentation and best practice – it’s content that’s so easily written but often so easily ignored or not put into practice properly.  Could the vendors not reduce their support costs so much by having the first line documentation they have on their screen re-configured for end users?

Community really is where it’s at and is the way of getting across your message, a sales guy is one thing having him turn up with the new laptop, the new server, but a networking event where I can come along get a glass of wine, some cheese and play with it, then speak to someone is such a more effective and lower cost way of doing things. You know your customers, use community to access them – find out where the issues and opportunities are and fix them – you’re keyboards broken, don’t worry we’ll post one to you… £3 of cost for much much more in value through recommendation, and onboarding.

Just look at what VMware/Apple have achieved – there really is no reason we can’t achieve the same with the desktop, with the server and everything else. There are so many bloggers out there in the Windows world that are writing the content for free, aggregate it and share it to your support/community portal.

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