Dell had always been interested in math and technology as a kid, but began to develop a substantial interest in computers in college at the University of Texas in Austin. As a hobby and side-hustle, he started pedaling computers he customized on campus with disk drives and extra memory.
The business even soon caught the attention of a then year-old Mark Cuban, now also a billionaire. At the time, Cuban was building his own business with computers, MicroSolutions, in Dallas. The business went private in In , Dell returned to the public markets as Dell Technologies. Watch the video above to see how Dell changed with the times to keep up with emerging consumer and business demands.
Skip Navigation. A man and woman assemble Dell computers on an assembly line in Austin, Texas. Competitors like IBM and Compaq struggled with the politics of managing their various channel partners and lagged Dell in inventory management.
When competitors tried to copy the direct model, their channel partners — fearing for their own businesses — objected, preventing other PC makers from fully going direct. In , Michael Dell left the company, replaced by Kevin Rollins, a former Bain consultant who joined the company in Though Rollins held the job for just two and a half years, he presided over a brisk decline, attributable to everything from bad customer service to shoddy batteries to questionable accounting practices.
Dell returned as CEO in It was against this background that Michael Dell last year hatched a plan to take the company private, with the help of the private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. So will it work? The data suggest that they do, and not just in the sense of creating returns for PE firms.
In a paper , researchers from HBS, Columbia, and the University of Chicago looked at the success of tech buyouts based on a novel measure: patents. Dell Computer was the world's largest PC maker. Born on February 23, , in Houston, Texas, and while his mother, a stockbroker, and his father, an orthodontist, pushed their son to consider medicine, Dell showed an early interest in technology and business.
A hard worker, Dell landed a job washing dishes at a Chinese restaurant at the age 12 so that he could put away money for his stamp collection. Intrigued by the expanding world of computers and gadgetry, Dell purchased an early Apple computer at the age of 15 for the strict purpose of taking it apart to see how it worked. It was in college that Dell found the niche that would become his boom.
The PC world was still young and Dell realized that no company had tried selling directly to customers. His emphasis, however, wasn't just on good machines, but strong customer support and cheaper prices. Soon, he had accounts outside of school and it wasn't long before Dell dropped out and focused all his efforts on his business. The numbers proved staggering.
By , Dell was a billionaire and his company had offices in 34 countries and employee count of more than 35, Overall, Dell's first 20 years proved to be one of the most successful businesses on the planet, surprising such titans as Wal-Mart and General Electric.
Dell's story is so compelling that, in , he published a best-selling book about his success, Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized the Industry.
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