Is the bell tolling for process-intensive (Dell, Home Depot, Amazon, Wal Mart, HP, Ikea, etc.), top of the class in operations, companies? Why have marketing-dept. driven companies (Apple, Nescafé, American Express, l´Oréal) so strongly gained momentum in the recent months?

Take the Dell-Apple bullfight. Check this MacDailyNews article. Ceteris paribus, Apple computers (laptops & desktops) now appear to be less expensive than Dells (see an example here, in Spanish but easy to pick up).

As a reminder, Apple´s market cap has been topping the one of Dell since the early days of May 2006.

Furthermore, Apple blows Dell away at the Google fight (see picture).

Adendum: I guess economics may help here. In growth periods, marketing-driven companies outperform operations-driven ones, and conversely. Provided that it already has a sort of cost-killing culture, I bet that Dell & HP will take the lead again at the next economic downturn.

Adendum 17th August 2006: Interesting article in InfoWorld about Mac Pro being overpriced.

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The 41 years old German architect Konstantin Grcic´s last blockbuster is nothing else but a laptop-friendly geek´s chair. I find it pretty cool.

I believe there is still a market for a beautiful, metal-designed, fashionable laptop furniture manufacturer. When you browse the Ikea, Home Depot, Staples & Office Depot websites, you indeed find some nice stuff – but people spend so much time on their laptop that they might let go a little premium to afford a unique environment for the time they use it from home.

Furthermore, laptop sales having outperformed desktop computers for half a decade, there is no reason why laptop-focused furniture sales aren´t skyrocketing.

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I´m not an iPod fan (see post).

And I´m happy to see Creative Technology launching, for the sake of all, its ZEN: elegant, light, powerful, & most of all working perfectly – unlike its Apple couterpart – in an opened, peer-to-peer, knowledge and information sharing environment.

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