As Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) restocks its executive roster this past February with noted industry veterans like Solectron's Mike Cannon and Motorola's Ron Garriques, where is the PC maker headed for the next 12 to 18 months? Note that I said "PC maker" here: although Dell has made more than PCs in the past, its forays into flat-panel TVs, MP3 players and other consumer electronics have largely fallen flat on their respective faces.

Dell simply cannot (and will not) just push its direct-buy model into the consumer electronics industry, where customers expect and demand to touch and feel those new toys before buying. As it turns out, consumers want to do this with PCs as well, which is a reason Hewlett-Packard Company (NYSE: HPQ) leapfrogged Dell last year to overtake it in the PC sales business.

When dissecting why Dell would hire a wireless industry giant away from popular (but struggling) cellphone maker Motorola, there were several opinions on that one. Ron Garriques is widely credited with rescuing the marketing and even design efforts of Motorola a few years back as the Motorola RAZR took the cellphone industry by storm (though not so much now). With Garriques heading up the consumer side of Dell's products and sales teams, will he also be heading up the possible development of a Dell-branded wireless handset?

With the cellphone industry so intensely competitive (forget the PC industry), would Dell even want to enter the market? If it did, the company would probably follow HP and enter the Windows Mobile Smartphone market instead of the low-margin and pressure filled standard handset market, in which it couldn't ever hope to make gains for the near future (or ever). Dell's Axim line of PDAs must be floundering (as are all non-phone PDAs right now), so perhaps Dell wants to enter the Smartphone market. Or is Garriques simply going to try and invigorate Dell's consumer products in terms of design and "freshness" like he did at Motorola? Over the course of 2007, we will all see -- that much is certain.