Product Development at Dell Corporation

Dell Corporation

Dell is one of the largest companies in the field of computers. It is based in Round Rock in Texas. The company was amongst the Fortune 1000 global companies in 2005. Dell is also present on the market of other computer products, such as servers, printers, PDA, tablets, player upright piano, grand piano and many different types of devices.

The company is formed by Micheal Dell. In 1983, Michael Dell, a young student at the University of Texas at Austin, spent his free time formatting hard drives for upgrade of IBM compatible PCs. He founded the company as a manufacturer and supplier of PC's Limited (SIC calls). A year later he left the school to meet its business had grown from nothing to 6 million. In 1985 the company produced its first computer of its own design, the Turbo PC with Intel 8088 processor running at 8 Mhz. In 1987, the PC limited installed its first service programs to compensate for the lack of local retailers prepared to act as service centers. It began the international expansion with the opening of a subsidiary in the UK, and eleven more international operations were followed within the next four years. In 1988, the market capitalization of Dell grew from $30 to $80 million in its initial public offering. That same year, the company changed its name to "Dell Computer Corporation" (DELL Computer Corporation).

The global giant is recognized for creative naming of products as per the positioning and specifications of the product it offers. The company in general sells OptiPlex, Precision and Latitude for customers with small and medium enterprises. Here, the company positions its product as reliable and long lasting. While Inspiron, XPS and Dimension are made for students and small environments; the product emphasizes on expandability, value, and performance. Dell has recently introduced its XPS series to target the market of gamers with relevant features. Since February 2011, the company compellent storage becomes part of the storage strategy IDM (Intelligent Data Migration) with PowerVault and Equalogic that covers all SAN storage needs. For NAS solutions, in 2010, Dell bought the company Exanet to give solutions distributed file system.

Product life cycle is an important phenomenon for any business enterprise. The analysis of the development of a product on the market, even theoretically, can be very useful for understanding the evolution of it since it tries to predict its development and, of course, attempts to influence this development (Wang, 2011). Here, we shall be talking about the global giant in computer assembling i.e. Dell in the context of product life cycle.

Product Life Cycle

The product life cycle is a concept of business administration and describes the process between the launch and completion of a marketable product and its removal from the market. The product life cycle is in most cases only for consumer goods. The product life cycle theories on the work of Raymond Vernon (1966) and Hirsch (1967) (product life cycle to Vernon decline) divide, the life of a product ...