Ramsey2 / Dell
I have wondered why Dell has taken so long to offer machines with TPM's. This is perplexing given the industry wide acceptance of the TPM model and Dell's membership within the TCG. Clealry Dell is delaying their offerings until they feel conditions warrant their entry. Given Dell's low cost producer strategy, they don't want to add products that will increase their operating cost if they don't have to. Given this assumption, I think that up till now three factors combine to cause their delay.
1. Dell doesn't feel they are losing significant market share due to their lack of TPM'd machines. Clearly, if deliveries ramp up as expected, this will not be the situation in the near future.
2. Dell is waiting for v1.2 TPM's as this is what Longhorn will require. This raises the question of when the final specs for 1.2 will be codified by the TCG. IIt can't be long now...
3. Dell has no interest in providing extensive customer assistance for non-core technology. An example of this is the joint Dell/McAfee security center that offers Dell customers McAfee service from a Dell branded web site. Using this as a business model, I imagine Dell would only offer TPM machines once a similar web site for exists for TPMs. This site would not be manned by Dell but rather firms in the business of TPM software. For instance, Wave could run such a center.
Dell is probably looking into the creation of this website and the partner to run it. In doing so, Dell has probably come up with a list of features they would like before going live. In this context, I found the following comments by SKS during the Q3 CC(available due to the continuing efforts of UncleverName, thanks!)to be of great interest:
That we have the right product. And we’re getting some good feature feedback from both the analysts and directly from the enterprise customers as to what are some of the baseline things we have to have. A few of those pieces we have to build. None of it takes a huge amount of time, but some of it does take some time. So we’ll be better positioned with those products for sort of a mainstream audience. Because we have had a few customers tell us, “Oh this is great. But, we’d really like, you know, this side in blue.” And so you’ve got to go figure out how to achieve that in a manner that’s pretty consistent.
AI
