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Dell Reflects on 25 Years of PCs
An anonymous reader writes "Michael Dell, founder of the world's largest computer company, took a few minutes with CNet News.com to reflect on the past 25 years and offer a few personal notes. While Dell certainly has an impressive business history, he still thinks the best is yet to come. From the article: 'Michael Dell started off using PCs to create homework shortcuts, the way many young people at the time discovered the new devices. Few people, including Dell's parents, realized exactly how large the potential was for the personal computer. More than 20 years after he founded PC's Limited, he admits his parents never quite embraced his decision to leave the University of Texas at Austin to start the company that would eventually bear his name and record $56 billion in revenue during its last fiscal year.'"
Yeah, Gates dropped out of Harvard... that's not exactly a rags to riches story, it's more like a riches to ridiculous riches story. Dell is an equally well connected and savvy businessman, he didn't drop out and then go for it from scratch, he more than likely had a good idea that money was coming in before he dropped out. That's the key part -- make sure to have some $ coming in (with signs of more) BEFORE you drop out!
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I knew Michael back when he was starting, and you're correct that the money was coming in before he dropped out. The guy was making about $20K/year in high school by hiring friends to help him sell subscriptions to the Houston Post at the same time as he was gray marketing IBM PCs out of his house.
When he went to UT in 1983 (he was pre-med, IIRC, because being a doctor is "an honorable profession"), there were exactly two licensed IBM dealers in the Austin area. Since IBM allocated machines per store rather than by regional demand, this meant that there was a 4-8 week wait to get an official IBM PC in the Austin area.
Michael walked into that environment and used his significant negotiating skills to start bringing bare bones PCs in from all over the country (persuading people to "bend" their IBM contracts) and selling them at a significant discount from IBM's prices with a turnaround in the neighborhood of a week. As a result, his revenues from PCs Limited were around 7 figures by the end of his freshman year... So Sophomore year probably seemed a bit pointless to him.
He definitely had the technical skills to put the computers together himself and he understands and likes the technology, but it has always been the money that interests him most. He has always had a remarkable ability to identify the talents in others and put them to work for him, but he's never personally been the source of actual technical innovations.
Gates, on the other hand, really is an uebergeek. And a shrewd businessman, of course, but the biggest difference between Gates and Dell is that Gates has always been interested in making lots of money by creating innovative technology, while Dell has always been interested in making lots of money by selling technology, innovative or otherwise.