

Dell to Sell Itself for $24.4 Billion - forgingahead
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324900204578285582125381660.html

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iag
I can't be more excited by this news. Michael Dell is in a pretty unique
position to do something innovative in the PC industry.

Remember when Dell told Steve Jobs that he should close shop?
<http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html>

Your turn, Michael.

Let's see if you can turn Dell around like the way Steve Jobs turned Apple
around!

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ajb
I'm less excited. Think about it: what would it take for a startup to buy
servers from Dell again, rather than renting them?

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jmduke
I'd argue that Dell has the strongest brand out of all of the Windows OEMs. I
think they'd be in a good position to take a few short-term losses and pursue
establishing a position similar to Vizio's: a high-end manufacturer. That,
coupled with their experience in B2B could absolutely revitalize their
company.

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RandallBrown
Isn't Vizio a low end manufacturer? Their TVs certainly are. I've never seen
one of their PCs though.

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philwelch
Why don't they just shut it down, and give the money back to the shareholders?

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raganwald
Although I do not like Dell's products or doing business with Dell, I don't
hold that against Michael Dell. At the time he said that Apple was not on a
course to succeed. It's true that since then they have made several high-
risk/high-reward course changes and succeeded, but even with the benefit of
hindsight his comment was reasonable.

I certainly wouldn't want to say that shutting down and giving the money back
to shareholders was a terrible idea because Apple was going to successfully
disrupt several different consumer markets where everyone gave them no chance
AND was going to reinvent its own supply chain management.

In hindsight, shutting down and giving money back to investors was probably
the second-best outcome after the outcome of performing one of the greatest
business comebacks in history. Had they stayed the course and continued to do
what they were doing when he said that, they'd have Blackberry'd themselves.

JM2C, obviously, and as an Apple fan I'm delighted they didn't follow that
advice, for the same reasons I'm delighted they didn't sell themselves to Sun
for $24 a share way back when, even if that was a substantial premium over
their $18-or-whatever stock price at the time.

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philwelch
There was a very wide middle path open to Apple where they just stayed a
profitable niche computer maker, and even that would have been a better bet
than liquidation. Dell's statements were already falsified by 2001 before the
iPod even came out, because Apple was three years profitable and on the verge
of solving their Mac OS problems with Mac OS X.

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chacha102
Can't read the article. Paywall block.

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mikeash
Try clicking on the link to the article here, appears to circumvent it:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Dell%20to%20Sell%20Itself%20...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Dell%20to%20Sell%20Itself%20for%20%2424.4%20Billion)

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jervisfm
Interesting, when coming to the link from Google[1], I didn't hit the pay-
block.

[1] - <http://goo.gl/TfUlG>

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tuananh
Google acquires them to do so. I read it somewhere.

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sjwright
Requires. Acquires would be scary.

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tuananh
brainfart. :D

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pla3rhat3r
Avaya did this and it worked out well for them. Hopefully this will help Dell.
They have a good product. Just seems like they've hit a rough patch.

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ash
I've read the article, but I still don't understand what happened to Dell and
why did they make the buyout. Could you explain it?

