"If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em" might be a good way to summarize Dell's purchasing of Alienware. Here is the official press release.

I'm actually a really big fan of this move. If the official announcement holds true, Alienware will remain independent, and stay as edgy as it currently is ... but now with Dell's component-buying power behind it.

What is less clear is what this means for Dell's XPS line. The line was always a clear attempt to out-do Alienware ... So what now? Well, it is clear that Michael finally realized that the hardcore gamers are not going to spend megabucks on a Dell gaming rig. As I found in my own search for a high end notebook, Dell just can't compete while it only uses Pentium M processors in their XPS notebook. The XPS desktops are pretty decent, but if I had $5000 to spend on a gaming rig, would I buy Dell or Alienware? Gamers are going to be swayed by whats cool, which is why I totally don't understand the $9500 Dell Renegade

Still, I see great upside from this deal. Following on from my earlier post about how Dell needed a shot of adrenaline, this could be it. The deal allows Dell to drop the XPS line and re-focus its small R&D budget on the rest of the line.

But perhaps most important of all, it allows Dell to finally have an AMD story. With this deal, if there is a particular market Dell wants to go after that really warrants the use of an AMD processor, or even some new market that they're unsure of, Dell can experiment without having to re-tool.

If there are losers in all this, it is probably Alienware's employees, who are likely to leave in significant numbers, after all, they went to Alienware because it was cool, and what is it now? Time will tell.

Next steps for Dell

Next steps for Alienware

Drop the XPS line, refocus the R&D spend. Use the rule of "5 +/- 2" to reduce the number of products in any category to around 5. Nobody can keep the difference between 10 products straight in their head. Find a new "halo" product. XPS didn't do it, so try something else. How about moving to super-slim notebooks, even if you have to license them the rest of the Samsung line (not just the X1). For desktops, why not reduce the line to around 4 products, and introducing an all-in-one along the lines of the iMac. Dell has a pretty good name in LCD monitors so this would seem to play to your strengths. Alienware is better than you at Media Center PCs (sorry). If you really want to be in the living room, why not bring the all-in-one idea here too, and integrate a PC into your plasma TVs. Several computer companies now sell plasma TVs but none of them are bridging the two worlds as far as I can tell.

OK, Alienware, you're now Dell's gaming division! You won! Now back to work... If you're working at Alienware, don't leave! Things are just getting interesting! Stop with the Intel-based servers. Dell has those, and is good at it. Move to Opteron-based. They have better power consumption and better performance (at least until Intel gets its story straight later in the year). That way you can share leads with Dell Corporate, and pick up all the AMD business they can't handle. Your workstations are OK, but Dell's are pretty good too. I would stick with AMD here too. Media Center PC: You're kicking ass here. Just remember where the equipment is used - in the family room, next to the TV. So the stuff needs to work there...

One last thing - Rather than copying each others websites, you now have a chance to share learnings up front. Get your Online business and IT teams talking to each other and you could really start innovating!

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In a follow-up to my previous post about my search for a high-end notebook, Neudesic's CEO generously offered to get me the Alienware Aurora m7700, with the AMD X2 4800+ and dual 7200RPM SATA drives with RAID 0! While Neudesic traditionally only bought Dell notebooks (none of which come close to the performance of this), this was an excursion from the norm - an experiment if you will. With Dell buying Alienware, he should be able to rest easy. We're all Dell again!

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So it didn't take long, but I'm getting super frustrated using a notebook as my work PC. Maybe I was spoiled at Dell, but there I had two (yes, two!) dual 3+GHz Xeon workstations.

While the 2GHz proc in my notebook is just ok, and it does have 2GB of RAM, I find it doesn't typically get close to maxing either of these out (at least according to Task Manager). I'm thinking it must be the 5400RPM hard drive.

What I really want is a notebook with a desktop processor in it (i.e. not the M version of the Pentium), and 7200RPM drives. Almost anytime I am working on my computer, I have access to AC power, so battery life doesn't bother me. At Neudesic we currently use Dell hardware, and while the newer Dell notebooks do come with 7200RPM SATA drives, all Dell notebooks come with Pentium M or Centrino chips. They also don't offer any dual-drive configurations even in their top of the line Inspiron XPS, so nearly all of the consultants have to carry external hard drives around with them.

Here's what I'd like:

17" WUXGA (1920x1200) display [good for Visual Studio and Photoshop]
AMD Athlon 64 FX-60 processor [good for pretty much everything!]
NVidia GeForce GO 7800 GTX video card [good for Windows Vista]
2GB Dual Channel DDR SDRAM at 400MHz [good for running Virtual Server networks]
2 x 100GB 7200RPM SATA hard drives in RAID 0 (stripe) configuration [good for keeping it all going!]

I started out looking at the "big boys", Falcon Northwest and Voodoo PC. They must have something like that amongst all their crazy gaming rigs, right?!

Falcon first... I priced it as close as I could based on their FragBook DR 6800 chassis. They didn't have the FX-60 CPU, so I chose the Athlon64 4800+. They didn't have 100GB hard disks, but they did have 80GB and the they could do RAID 0 (for those that don't know, RAID 0, aka. striping, is where you get to drives the same type/size and join them together to form one large disk where alternating writes go to each disk. This makes your disk I/O almost 2x faster, but if one of the drives fail, you lose the whole C: drive, so backups are important).

Anyway, with this configuration the Falcon system came to $5882! And thats with a $400 cheaper CPU and $100+ cheaper hard drive option!

Next Voodoo. With their Envy u709 I found the exact same configuration (plus a few things I couldn't deselect) came to $6101! I guess thats about the difference in the bits I couldn't get at Falcon Northwest. Yikes! I also had the option to add an even more expensive paint job to it and put on "tattoos" for that personalized look. I just almost hear the teasing I'd get at work showing up with this system ...

At this point I decided I needed to shop around some more. I know about Alienware from having one of their Shuttle-based desktop systems, so lets look at them. There, the same configuration (here in the form of the Aurora M7700) came to $4850 or so.

And thats when I noticed something odd. Did you spot it yet?

At this point I hit the forums to find out what the deal was. Do you know? They're all basically made by the same company - a company called Clevo. You can find the exact same computer at Clevo's site.

It was actually one of my colleagues put me on to this. He owns a Sager, which are also made by Clevo. It turns out the same configuration coming from Sager in the form of the Sager 9750-V comes to around $4195. For the exact same thing. Except that you've probably never heard of them. But who cares - its the same hardware with the same level of warranty!

Seems hard to believe that the same PC in the same spec could cost anywhere from $4200 to $6100 depending on who you bought it from. No doubt if you should up at a frag party with the Sager and your friend showed up with the Voodoo, you'd get mocked for it ... at least until you showed them all the games you bought with your $2000 savings!

So how about me? What am I going to do. I'm going to sit on it for a week or two. Its still $4200 at then end of the day. And its for work. I guess that means I get to write it off somehow on my taxes, but its still $4200.

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I came in to the end of a conversation two of the guys in the office were having. One guy asked the other "... so, if Jesus was God, how come he died?". This was too much of an invitation, so I explained it along these lines: "Jesus was God, but he was running inside a VPC [a Virtual PC environment]. Once the Romans tore down the VPC, the God service running on it stopped running".

This way of looking at it is probably riddled with inaccuracies, but it certainly puts a new spin on a classic theology problem.

If you're a total dork.

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