Never Say Never - a lesson from big business
I guess the title says it all, you should never say “Never!” because never may not be as set in concrete in the future as it might seem right now.
Dell recently announced that they were going to be offering their servers and PCs with an AMD processor. In the past Dell relied entirely on Intel products but over the last few years AMD have been able to at least match Intel on price, quality and performance so moving to AMD is a wise choice.
However, not all that long ago Dell were making pronouncements such as:
- “There’s not enough performance advantage.”
“We need lots of chips, more than AMD can produce.”
“Introducing another chip sullier into our exclusive partnership with Intel would complicate our lean manufacturing line.”
“Our customers simply don’t want AMD’s products.”
“We’re the most successful PC company on the planet and we don’t have AMD. Could I do it” Yeah, but why?” (Dell’s CEO in late 2004)
So what changed? Dell’s competitors began offering their products with a choice of Intel or AMD and suddenly ‘never’ became a relative term.
