Recent Forbes article about the history of DELL. It's quite long...

Recent Forbes article about the history of DELL. It's quite long so I've attached a few of the more interesting comments.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/08/03/deal-of-the-century-how-michael-dell-turned-his-declining-pc-business-into-40-billion-windfall/?sh=595dd0e75c2a

The previous week, fellow ten-figure mogul Richard Branson had kicked off the billionaire space race. Some people saw innovation and ambition. Others saw ego and hubris. Dell saw . . . opportunity.

“We’re selling to a lot of the emerging space companies,” he says matter-of-factly. “You can’t do all those engineering feats without an incredible amount of computing power, data and artificial intelligence.”

Soon Dell will sit at the helm of two separate public companies: Dell Technologies, his personal computer and IT infrastructure giant, and its spinoff, VMware, a mainstay in cloud-computing infrastructure. Both will hold manageable debt levels and a valuable currency for growth and acquisitions.

“Everybody’s eyes are on Amazon, Microsoft and Google,” says billionaire Marc Benioff, the cofounder of Salesforce and a friend of Dell’s. “They don’t realize that Dell has quietly amassed the market share in enterprise technology.”

The amazing comeback of Michael Dell boils down to one critical fact: He correctly read where the technology industry was headed at the decisive moment.


The personal computer, buoyed by surging orders as workers built home offices during the pandemic, is far from dead. PC sales rose 20% to $13.3 billion last quarter. Moreover, public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure didn’t take over the IT world despite all their success. Corporations are taking a diversified approach, using public cloud platforms like AWS but retaining massive on-premises IT infrastructure for valuable and old data, in addition to private clouds. Buying EMC made Dell a giant in servicing the infrastructure of data centers, one of the tech sector’s big growth markets.

Dell has always enjoyed selling equipment to businesses and using the relationship to add services. Right now, his company is the world’s biggest in data storage, servers and “hyperconverged” infrastructure. It’s the top seller of desktop computers and monitors in North America. Now he wants to use his position to bundle companies’ IT needs under one roof.

“You’re already buying eight of the 20 things you need from us,” Dell says of his pitch to large and midsize enterprises. “Why don’t you just buy all 20 from us? And by the way, we’ll make it worth your while.”

Even more alluring is Dell’s recent launch of its Apex product to sell data and cloud-management subscription services based on customers’ use. Once-lumpy sales will become recurring services that generate more revenue as usage increases. With $94 billion in sales and $13 billion in operating cash flow for the year ending January 2021, Dell projects it will grow at double the rate of global gross domestic product in the coming years. Its biggest opportunity comes from “the edge,” he says, referring to the concept of managing data closer to where it’s generated. As energy, transportation, health care and communications infrastructure become digital, Dell predicts these “edge” needs will grow at a 17% annual clip.
“Gartner estimates 75% of data will be at the edge within five years,” he says. “You’re not going to move all that data to the cloud.” Other potential growth markets include telecom equipment such as 5G infrastructure and virtual desktops as companies build hybrid post-pandemic footprints.