Well, I’m sure you’ve read by now the news that Dell officially announced they are buying Alienware. Rumors of this have been floating around for weeks, but nothing concrete has been uncovered.

What really annoys me about this so far is that the DOD Sales Reps for Dell were in the office last week to pitch their big rack-server solutions. I wasn’t there, but my boss was (I’m lucky enough to actually have a technogeek like myself for a boss). He reads The Register and had seen the rumors, and asked the rep during the Q&A “Is Dell buying Alienware?”. That started a 5 minute tirade that went something like “Dell has no need or interest in buying a gaming company”, “Dell believes in growing from within, not growing through acquisition”, “Dell is not buying Alienware”. After a spiel like that, we were convinced, albeit a bit disappointed. After yesterday’s announcement tho, we’re both happy & annoyed. The reps could have easily stated “We are not at liberty to discuss that” or just discussed it under NDA, but they simply lied about it.

On a good note, it seems Dell will now be offering AMD chips, albeit rather strangely. From the reports I’ve read, you won’t see Alienware PC’s on Dell’s website, and Alienware PC’s won’t carry Dell branding. So basically you’ll just have to buy your computer directly from Alienware, and Dell just gets an invisible cut of the money. I figure that in a few months to a year, they’ll probably just dissolve and absorb Alienware and start marketing them directly, and there’s a bit of information leaning towards that although it’s from rather unreliable sources.

Here at the office we’re still kinda wondering why Dell would do this. A few labs here have ditched Dell in favor of Alienware, because they prefer Opterons to Xeons, but not enough that Dell is losing millions. There is the AMD option, but Dell could have just as easily (and probably cheaper) just started their own Opteron PC line. Personally, I think that Dell is interested in some of Alienware’s hardware divisions. When Dell was here pitching their server equipment, the one thing notably missing was graphics abilities. Alienware has hardware for putting high-end NVidia cards in laptops, which seems to me would be fairly compatible with server blades. Could Dell be hoping to get their grubby hands on it?
[tag:dell][tag:alienware][tag:hardware]

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