A Three-Letter Word For 'Dell?'

Crunchgear.com's Dewayne Smith asks the question: Is Dell now hip?

Once upon a time, Dell was played second fiddle to Apple in terms of hippness. However, with the recent launch of their multicolored Inspiron notebooks, along with a partnership with Google and actually compelling ads, Dell might be making a come back.

It's not just pretty notebooks. Dell has been working hard to fix service issues that hurt it mightily a couple of years ago, it's adding to its brand lineup for small business and it's now touting its plans for working with the channel. Beyond that, the company has also managed to quell very vocal critics, like blogger Jeff Jarvis, who started a blog storm in 2005 by detailing his "Dell Hell" on his site Buzzmachine.com. Jarvis wrote earlier this week a "Happy Birthday" message to Dell's corporate blog and praised Dell blogger Lionel Menchaca for "jumping into the fire."

Dell may or may not be hip, but it's certainly the flavor of the month.

Wall Street has been bullish as well, sending the company's stock to a 52-week high this week with at least two firms, CS First Boston and Friedman, Billings, Ramsey, raising their outlook on Dell. But, in their note to investors, FBR analysts Clay Sumner and Jorge Maceyras say this:

As a reminder, we believe that Dell margins will tend to be more volatile now that the SEC's accounting investigation likely curtailed what we believe may have been a past practice of managing component cost volatility with warranty accruals.

Even with good feelings all the way around, and the blogosphere and technosphere sending Dell warm fuzzies, there are reminders that the Round Rock, Texas-based PC maker is still looking over its shoulders at two federal investigations and one internal probe into past accounting and financial reporting issues. Those probes have prevented Dell from filing mandatory financial reports and, on Monday, Dell appears to have come within hours of being delisted from Nasdaq before Nasdaq's board granted the company a reprieve.

Michael Dell has worked hard to build a firewall between the Old Dell and the New Dell, preferring people focus on the company's positive changes, innovations and new strategy. It's working. But the Old Dell will still be around -- as you can tell by reading Sumner's and Maceyras' report and the delisting threat -- until the company puts the accounting issues and that part of its past to bed.

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