Dell, Inc. NASDAQ: DELL) indicated this week that it has no plans to re-enter the digital music player market. For some reason, the blogosphere has been abuzz in recent weeks with possible rumors about Dell -- again -- trying to compete in the digital MP3 player market. With its astounding success the last time around, it makes perfect sense, right? Of course not.Although Dell has reinvigorated its laptop PC designs in the last 18 months, has entered retail and has gained a little of the market share back it lost of Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ), the fact remains that it makes boring, commodity computer equipment. Nothing more. Almost every single time the company wants to break into another market, the competition beats them down and spits them out. So, it's good to hear that Dell won't be getting back into the digital audio player market.
The weird twist here is that Dell purchased Zing Software recently, which made wireless access technology for over-the-air audio and video downloads to digital audio players. It's interesting to see that Dell bought Zing but less in 18 months later said it would not re-enter the hardware music player business. Of course, a lot has changed for the company in that time (and in the PC industry), and launching new products and categories in this economic environment is precarious at best. Perhaps Dell has shelved digital audio players until sometime in 2010 or later.
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