HP vs Dell: The Gap Widens

It’s time for The VAR Guy to eat some crow. For nearly a year, he has been predicting that Dell would rebound. He also expected the company to recruit a few savvy IT consulting firms to support its server and storage initiatives. Dell’s latest quarterly results, announced today, show that The VAR Guy was wrong on all accounts. Ouch.

This stock chart shows just bad things have gotten in the past year. While HP’s stock is up 16 percent, Dell’s is down 22 percent. In other words, if you invested $1,000 in each company a year ago, you’d be at $1,160 with HP and $780 with Dell. That’s quite a gap. Even BusinessWeek—a long-time Dell cheerleader—is off the bandwagon. And while The VAR Guy has purchased numerous Dell laptops and even Dell TVs, he is now only buying Apple hardware whenever possible.

Dell will be back, but 2006 and early 2007 were far worse than The VAR Guy had anticipated.