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Dell Founder Dropped $100M Onto Red Hat
diegocgteleline.es writes "Via google news, I found a article at MSNBC claiming that Michael Dell, Dell's founder and chairman, has droped $100M into Red Hat (Michael himself, not his company). Analyists say that "Dell - neither the person nor the company - is interested in acquiring Red Hat", but one wonders what's behind of this move. A fight against their competence in the server market?"
Once upon a time, Dell had their own SVR4 UNIX Distro. Perhaps Mr Dell has a passion for OS's.
Michael Dell is just making sure that he has multiple sources for his supplies. Operating systems is just one component in his systems. Only a veriy foolish CEO would tie himself to single source.
He's also tweaking MSFT. MSFT could come back with lower prices (of course, they could come back with higher prices). Dell has enough muscle to pay the higher Microsoft price if asked to.
Yeah, that was right around the time when Sun was getting in big trouble for cutting corners. They pretty much lost EBay because of it. Sun lost a lot of consumer trust during that period.
These days I wouldn't buy from them, just because their financial situation is so bleak that there's no reason to believe that they'll still be in business in 1-2 years.
1. They have 7 billion in the bank, and they're more or less breaking even. That's not *that* bleak.
2. You have the hardware. It's a standard box with PC hardware. Who cares about whether Sun will be there or not?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
When you've got multiple billions of dollars in liquid assets, investing one tenth of one of those billions in a company that you like is a no-brainer. Risk, shmisk.
Michael Dell has been a capitalist his whole life, from selling newspaper subscriptions to selling PCs out of his dorm room. He's always been a risk-taker and an achiever. I'm not really impressed with him as a deep thinker, from the few interviews and articles I've seen him do, but that's not his area.
His goal was becoming the top PC maker, even bigger than IBM. His victory in that arena is complete, having driven IBM out of the PC market. Those of us who have watching the computer scene since the '70s should think back to what IBM was then.
Suppose a new kind of car were invented that a guy in his garage could make, and one of those garage hackers figured out how to mass-market his vehicle. If he did it so well that GM decided to get out of the consumer market altogether, that would rival what Dell did.
So what do he do when at 40 having accomplished what seemed like an impossible goal? I'd want my life to mean something besides business, but I'm not him.
I suspect you'll see Dell try to accomplish some new "impossible" goal, whether it's space exploration, a cancer cure, seawater desalination, selling electric cars, or whatever.
I don't know, because I don't dream big enough.
sigs, as if you care.
Actually, syntactically that is a pretty ambiguous statement.
If a sentence is properly constructed, you should be able to remove the modifier to get the meaning of this statement. "Neither the person nor the company" is just a modifier of "Dell" to specify which "Dell" they're talking about. Remove it for the sentence's meaning:
"Dell is interested in acquiring Red Hat"
However, they use a negative "Neither/nor" construction in an inclusive modifier, which really confuses things. If they really mean "not" they should start with a negative sentence:
"Dell is NOT interested in acquiring Red Hat"
and then modify it with an inclusive modifier:
"Dell, EITHER the person OR the company, is not interested in acquiring Red Hat."
Or they could be more specific and retain the neither/nor construction:
"Neither Dell corporation nor Michael Dell is interested in acquiring Red Hat."
Grammar slackers often make fun of grammar nitpickers, saying "they know what I mean." Well, not in this case. Taken as written, this sentence means the exact opposite of what was probably intended. Grammar conveys specific meaning, and people who do not know or care to follow the rules of grammar risk misunderstanding.
This story is a great example of the fact that the slashdot editors seem to fall into at least one of those categories.