Om Malik interviews Michael Dell, and sure enough its "supply chain advantage" comes up. To me, though, that is so 90s because it still focuses on its hard-good manufacturing and distribution efficiencies.
Dell is today much more of a services player but it has not shown the ruthlessness to optimize the service chain. What is the opportunity? To drive traditional outsourcing pricing from $ 3 a gb a month for storage to 20c that cloud computing models are showing. Instead, as Dell points out elsewhere in the interview he is content to sell equipment to cloud providers.
Not just in the data center, there is a huge opportunity to optimize deskside management - it is embarrassing that to some companies BestBuy's GeekSquad can provide a better outsourcing solution than established infrastructure outsourcing players with massively more scale. Ditto with IT help desk, asset management etc - areas where Dell has shown early signs of competence.
But to me Dell is still a hard-good vendor. It will likely spend more mind share in getting in to smart phones and selling stuff to other outsourcers, when its real big opportunity is in blowing up the infrastructure services supply chain.
