Why is industry and academia in the US so fixated on Dell computers?

Factual Questions
1

I have gone to school and worked for several software contracting firms, and almost without question, in the past ten years, Dell computers represented the overwhelming majority of computers found on-site. Typically, a few Macs could frequently be found for those who preferred them or for compatibility testing purposes, but other PC brands were rare. I worked for one company where we had like 200+ Dell PC’s, 2 iMacs, and 2 Gateway PC’s.

What causes this? I can think of three possibilities:

  1. There is something inherently superior about Dell manufacturing or support that institutional customers recognize but the person on the street doesn’t.
  2. Dell provides exceptional support and/or pricing to institutional customers who order in bulk, and companies like HP don’t hold a candle to it.
  3. It’s a psychological/ herd mentality thing, if you are a purchasing manager and the previous manager always bought Dells, and every company you worked for also bought Dells, and the school you went to always bought Dells, you are probably leaning toward Dells due to the familiarity.
2

Academia is the Apple heartland IME. The place I’m at now is the first university school I’ve not seen dominated by Macs, and that’s just because we had an old codger of an IT guy couldn’t stand them, and he was let do his own thing in isolation from the general university IT policy.

3

Easy credit. Dell has long been good at approving its customers for credit.

4

This is the biggie. I think they might have exclusivity agreements, too, as a condition of the low prices.

5

It’s because Dell makes it easy to buy their computers. This isn’t as true anymore, as Dell has made things harder, and other companies have made things easier, but 10 years ago it was much easier to buy a Dell than anything else. By that I mean, when I wanted a Dell, I could go to the Dell website, login to my institutional account, custom build what I wanted, and a week later the computer would show up. To buy from most companies (HP, IBM/Lenovo, Sun, etc.) I would have to scour their websites to figure out which of the many prebuild models best suited my needs, then call/e-mail an account rep, then call/e-mail a different account rep when I found out the rep had changed, then go back and forth a few times to nail down pricing, then finally place the actual order.

Sure I’ve made the HP, etc. ordering process seem like a pain, but it only takes one instance of it being that messed up to really make Dell’s no nonsense process be the first go to for purchasing. Even the “typical” process of knowing what I want and calling the rep to get one, is more of a pain than just clicking on Dell’s website.

Anyway, that is the view of the little guy in the trenches who can buy from pretty much whatever manufacturer he wants, and mostly buys 1-5 systems at a time. Repeat that across many departments, and pretty soon you have a large organization filled with Dells.

The part about Dell making things harder is probably more of a pit thread, but they’ve started to slide towards what other manufacturers do, which is create different products lines, many of which aren’t available for institutional buying, at least with out great annoyance.

As to the 1, 2, 3 points there isn’t really anything “exceptional” about the Dell systems. Much more of “good enough”. A pretty good system, at a pretty good price, with good enough support. The big win for them in my case (and many of my peers) is in making my job easier.

6

Have you any evidence for the underlined statement?

Universities and schools do not usually have the funding to waste on buying something that is ‘trendy’ but overpriced and also lacks flexibility for modification and is not what is used by industry.

7

I think he might be citing his own experience as his evidence.

8

I think you are basing this on limited experience no matter how much it is just because you are one person who has worked in just a few companies. I work in IT generally for mega-corps and I have never worked for a large company that bought Dell computers. My current company is as famous as any in the world and it is an IBM shop with no Dells to be seen. That isn’t because IBM (or HP for that matter) desktops and laptops are that great though. We buy those just because of the bundled hardware and software contracts which involve everything the company runs on from the lowliest temp to manufacturing facilities and emergency response teams.

I did work as IT manager for a smaller company once and I did buy Dells there plus anything else I felt like was the best deal at the time just because standardization and long-term contracts weren’t important there and a decent computer is as good as any other as far as I am concerned for most business users. My home computer is also a Dell for the same reason. Most computers are really just commodity items unless you are dealing with complicated support contracts or very specialized needs and Dell is plenty good enough at supplying those.

9

My impression for the academia side matches most of those above. Dell offers generally user-friendly configuration, competitive prices, and excellent on-site service (for their industry). As long as they keep it up, they will likely maintain decent market share, as it is easier to stay with the status quo if the status quo is serving you just fine.

On the Macs-in-academia thing: there are definitely strong pockets of Mac-dom (a particular department/subfield/collaboration might be Mac devotees), but it is not that Macs predominate in academia as a whole. And while I feel like I’ve seen a sufficient amount of academia to make this claim, I must agree with the previous poster that this thread is in terrible need of actual data on usage.

10

Dell works hard to win the state contact bid. They’ve had the state contract in my state most years.

That means all state agencies and schools / university can purchase from them. There’s a special Dell website store for our state with special pricing. I’m sure it’s the same way for other states that gave Dell a contract too. We can buy from other sources, but our preferred vendor is the one on state contract.

We also get top notch support. Dell doesn’t want to lose our state contract. They put effort into it.

11

I worked for a large hotel company and Dells were dirt cheap. When I opened hotels in Manhattan, they were all Dells, 'cause we got them for a little more than 20% of what we would’ve paid retail. In all the computers I dealt with over the four years I was there, we only had TWO bad ones, out of the thousands I ordered over NYC and Chicago hotels, we had.

And those were replaced virtually overnight and they broke within the first two days of getting them.

We were one of the largest hotel owners in the world, so we got a great deal on Dells.

I remember my MIS manager was not to thrilled at the beginning but it worked out very well.

12

The computers the University itself buys are mostly PCs (Dell specifically), but the computers sold in the bookstore, and owned by the students and faculty, are heavily Apple. And there are a lot more computers owned by individuals in a university than by the University as a whole.

13

Anecdotal evidence/personal experience: if you need a Unix-like laptop that will work “out of the box”, macs are not that expensive. Combined with Adobe support, this may influence academic work quite a bit. I know it’s what convinced me to buy a Macbook.

Now that I’ve decided I don’t need Adobe software everywhere I go, I might go for a Lenovo laptop with Debian or Ubuntu next time, but it will be more expensive than a mac (it’s worth it to me, though).

14

I’m curious: What do you do that makes you need a Unix-like OS on your laptop (as opposed to SSHing into one) and Adobe software too?

15

Large organizations have the opportunity to see first hand which brands have service issues.

I’ve ordered Dell, Gateway and Micron computers for our Department. They all worked well. I really liked Micron. Shame they went out of business.

I did have issues with the Gateway Pc’s. The hard drive controller failed on one within three months. Gateway fixed it under Warranty. But I got stuck doing the work. They sent a new motherboard and I switched it out. Another Gateway’s power supply died (past warranty) and I had to replace it. They are proprietary and I had to pay extra to get an exact replacement.

My biggest issue with Dell and Gateway is their proprietary power supplies. You can’t upgrade the motherboard because of that darn power supply.

16

Maybe big corporations, but the Federal Govet is basically a Dell shop. Prices, priority delivery and spare parts seem to win the contract.

17

The colleges in my area all use Windows computer as their primary operating system. There are some Macs, but only for special uses. The main reasons for this is that PCs cost less per unit and also are much easier to network and manage via a network (the same reasons why PCs are more common in business).

In our case, we started with a local vendor who couldn’t give us the service we wanted. We switched to Gateway, but found that Dell gave us better terms, so switched to Dell about eight years ago.

18

Two things that also factor into this:

  • Besides the ease of ordering a Dell customized to your needs, it’s also very easy to order 249 more exactly like that. And 6 months later, to order 50 more identical to the originals (even though some of those parts are obsolete now). Having all your computers exactly identical is important to a large company that has an internal IT maintenance/repair staff.

  • Really big companies (those with mainframes) often had IBM PC’s because they ended up being so cheap. IBM offered discounts/rebates as a percentage of the total purchases from IBM over the year – including mainframes, mainframe software, IBM consulting services, supplies, and IBM PC’s. So if purchasing your PC’s from IBM, even at slightly higher prices than Gateway, pushed you from 1% to 2% off on your multi-million dollar mainframes, it was worth it.

19

Education has always been one of the strongest markets for Apple. It’s amazing to me that this is even in question. That’s not to say that Apple has more market share than other manufacturers, but that they have a higher share in education than they do in other industries. This has always been the case (even when their market share was at its lowest).

Some data on Mac ownership among students at University of Virginia (see charts):

Given the vast difference between Mac marketshare there and overall worldwide Mac marketshare, I think it’s pretty safe to say that Apple does very well at University of Virginia. I don’t think that university is unique.

20

I think the Mac discussion might be a hijack, but one should remember that Apple has a larger profit margin on their workstation product than any competitors. Apple thus has more ability to discount its product if it should choose to do so in an effort to capture mind share among college kids.
If Apple chooses to do it, it can basically give away its fine OS product to .edu types and let the rest of us pay for the development cost.
It isn’t a cheap OS to develop, but once the initial dev cost for a given version has been paid, installing it on more units that ship from their factory costs them nothing.
Dell can’t just tell Microsoft to give away the OS…