For Dell, The Future Starts Next To The Flip-Flops

Dell has officially begun selling desktops inside Wal-Marts across the U.S., making its re-entry into the retail, brick-and-mortar space that it abandoned in the early 1990s. The company announced barely two weeks ago that it would sell desktops via Wal-Mart, a week or so after Michael Dell told us that his company would also sell through the commercial reseller channel in North America.

For less than $500, you, too, can pick up 1 GB of shared DDR memory, up to 250 GB of storage, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+, and Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium in a Dimension E 521 box. You just need to look on the other side of the aisle from the Acer-, Toshiba-, HP-, Compaq- and eMachines-branded PCs. The aisle is about two feet away from several racks of ladies summer flip-flops and kiddie beach buckets.

(You can also expect to wait for 20 minutes on a check-out line, or up to 35 or 40 minutes on a Saturday morning.)

The story here isn't that Dell is selling PCs through Wal-Mart, or even that it will begin selling Turion-based Inspiron notebooks through Sam's Clubs later this week. The story is that Dell continues to change itself at break-neck speed, with little if any pause.

A year ago, Dell's then-CEO Kevin Rollins was throwing cold water on the idea of selling through the channel, saying "we're the direct company." A few weeks ago, his predecessor/successor Michael Dell was saying that all would change, radically.

Since Dell went public with the new company strategy, there has been a mixed public response from the channel. An online survey we've run consistently showed up to 55 percent of solution providers would do business with Dell, but, in conversations, many continue to say they have their misgivings.

For what it's worth, the computer aisle at Wal-Mart this afternoon was relatively empty after the lunch-time rush.