Dell is in the right business for 2020, Sam Burd, president of the company's PC hardware and software business, told Cheddar.
"One thing that we've seen in 2020 is technology has become really important to how people get things done," he said. "Getting that technology in the hands of our customers has been really important to keeping the world operating."
The computer giant pulled $23.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, beating analyst's expectations of $21.9 billion, largely through increased demand for laptops and PCs.
Burd explained that we've quickly gone from a world where maybe one PC was sufficient for a single household to one where multiple are needed, as students and employees alike work remotely amid the coronavirus pandemic.
This trend also applied to the public sector, which increased its spend on technology to offer remote education options.
On the back-end, Burd added, this has increased the need for cybersecurity.
"The world we're in today, we have a very distributed set of how people are doing work, so that attack surface has gotten a lot bigger for companies or for even people in their household," he said.
He noted that a Dell study found that 44 percent of businesses have had a hardware-based breach in the past year, and that the number is likely much higher.
Dell's success in 2020 also shows that earlier predictions that the PC was dead — in light of competition from products like tablets and smartphones — missed the mark, Burd noted.
"We're kind of hitting the 10-year anniversary where some of the press started to say that the PC was dead," he said. "Since that point in time, as an industry we have shipped over two billion systems. Customers had had demand for $3 trillion of PCs. So the death of the PC was highly overhyped."
Joe Cecela, Dream Exchange CEO, explains how they are aiming to form the first minority-controlled company to operate an exchange in U.S. history. Watch!
A Michigan judge is putting sponges in the hands of shoplifters and ordering them to wash cars in a Walmart parking lot when spring weather arrives. Genesee County Judge Jeffrey Clothier hopes the unusual form of community service discourages people from stealing from Walmart. The judge also wants to reward shoppers with free car washes. Clothier says he began ordering “Walmart wash” sentences this week for shoplifting at the store in Grand Blanc Township. He believes 75 to 100 people eventually will be ordered to wash cars this spring. Clothier says he will be washing cars alongside them when the time comes.
The State Department had been in talks with Elon Musk’s Tesla company to buy armored electric vehicles, but the plans have been put on hold by the Trump administration after reports emerged about a potential $400 million purchase. A State Department spokesperson said the electric car company owned by Musk was the only one that expressed interest back in May 2024. The deal with Tesla was only in its planning phases but it was forecast to be the largest contract of the year. It shows how some of his wealth has come and was still expected to come from taxpayers.
At 100 years old, the Goodyear Blimp is an ageless star in the sky. The 246-foot-long airship will be in the background of the Daytona 500 — flying roughly 1,500 feet above Daytona International Speedway, actually — to celebrate its greatest anniversary tour. Even though remote camera technologies are improving regularly and changing the landscape of aerial footage, the blimp continues to carve out a niche. At Daytona, with the usual 40-car field racing around a 2½-mile superspeedway, views from the blimp aptly provide the scope of the event.
You'll just have to wait for interest rates (and prices) to go down. Plus, this deal's a steel, the big carmaker wedding is off, and bribery is back, baby!
