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Dell Is Now a Private Company Again
Gunfighter writes "StreetInsider.com reports that Dell, Inc. completed its go-private transaction by Michael Dell, Dell's Founder, Chairman and CEO, and Silver Lake Partners, a leading global technology investment firm. Stockholders will receive $13.75 in cash for each share of Dell common stock they hold, plus payment of a special cash dividend of $0.13 per share to stockholders of record as of the close of business on Oct. 28, 2013, for total consideration of $13.88 per share in cash. The total transaction is valued at approximately $24.9 billion."
Well, yeah, except that Dell was right, in 1997, about what to do with Apple as a company that made computers.
Of course, it turned out that shifting their core business model from making computers to making gadgets was an even better idea.
Except for all the success they had with iMac, Powerbook G4, iBook before iPod
It’s high end services, not high end computers, that M. Dell really wants to do is sell.
Take a look at what companies Dell has been buying recently. They have been high end high touch hardware (IIRC in the storage market) and consulting services. He wants to go down the same road that IBM and HP have travled.
I would love to see someone else copy Apple in one regard. Make less choices for the customer. There doesn't need to be 10 different desktop models, and 10 different laptop models. Apple has 3 desktops (mini, iMac and Mac Pro), while allowing the user to choose a few basic options like amount of RAM, hard drive space, and processor speed. And they have 2 models of laptops. Customers know exactly what they are getting with Apple, and they know when there's a new model available, because it only happens once a year. With Dell, and other PC manufacturers, there's tons of different models, nobody really knows how to compare one to the other, and you never know how old the current model is, and when the new model is coming out.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
How about making some quality workstation laptops for business users?
We want:
- Rock-solid build quality and screen hinges
- Sturdy keyboards with standard 7-row layout (text nav 3x2 cluster, F key groupings, non-chiclet)
- Stick mouse (clit mouse, whatever you want to call it) with actual buttons, not these bullshit buttons built into a trackpad
- Understated, boxy designs (no flashy bullshit)
- 4:3 screens (or, at least, 5:4)
Lenovo has completely fucked up the ThinkPad line by removing literally every great feature that made a ThinkPad great. Go and eat their lunch.
There is a massive difference between taking it private and buying out the shareholders for the purpose of shutting it down, even if the first step looks the same on the surface. I have no idea what Mr. Dell is planning, but in general operating a business in a way that makes shareholders happy is not necessarily the best strategy for a technology company. Shareholders want to see the goods on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and if a particular quarter is down, the shareholders interpret that as a hiccup in the company's strategy and punish the stock accordingly. However, running a technology company requires a long-term view of the future, and a roadmap for how to get there. That roadmap may require some sacrificial quarters where emphasis is put into future R&D rather than maximizing current sales. If done properly, future awesome technology to come from that R&D more than makes up for a couple of flat quarters. But the markets don't see it that way. So the only way to be able to fully achieve the potential of the roadmap is to take the stock market out of the equation.
Dell has gigantic portion of the business market. desktop workstations, laptops, and servers.
So did Sun at one point.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
A CEO and his board don't wake up one morning to a drop in stock price and scream "we need to lay people off, NOW!!" It's a bit more sophisticated than that even if you don't agree with the layoffs.
Right. It's the boys from McKinsey break the news to the CEO that after camping out in the conference room for six weeks.
Except those were NOT that successful, and those were precisely the computers Dell was talking about and which were sinking Apple at the time.
Jobs vision was that he had to stop relying on desktop computers because he was clearly losing that war in spite of a few partially successful products. His vision saved the company by moving to gadgets, and letting the computer side play catch up. Jobs pretty much followed Dell's advice, pulling almost all the R&D money away from computers. He shit-canned his own operating system, went out and grabbed FreeBSD, Konqueror, and Cups, and packaged it to keep the faithful happy while the real effort went into the iPhone.
Only his pride prevented him from killing off the computer line altogether.
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