BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
11 May 2008
related tags: Hardware | Management | Apple | Dell |

Back in 1997, Michael Dell was asked what he would do if he were running Apple.  He answered:

And at the Gartner Symposium and ITxpo97 here today, the CEO of competitor Dell Computer added his voice to the chorus when asked what could be done to fix the Mac maker. His solution was a drastic one.

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,” Michael Dell said before a crowd of several thousand IT executives.

Dell’s comments follow Steve Jobs’s keynote address at the Seybold trade show last week in San Francisco, where the Apple cofounder seemed to win over attendees with his explanation of why he had made certain key decisions, killing the clone market and aligning more closely with Microsoft. The Seybold crowd–as well as some Apple employees–also seemed to be buoyed by the increasing role Jobs has taken on at the company as board member and interim CEO.

But others, like Dell, appear to think that Jobs’s expanded role isn’t helping. There is some concern that Apple will have a hard time recruiting a top-notch CEO because of Jobs’s presence.

Eleven years later, you can pretty much swap Apple with Dell and Michael Dell with Steve Jobs.  But the point is: Dell probably should not have said that, and I guess, the lesson is, it’s a good thing Fake Steve Jobs and not the actual Steve Jobs is saying that Dell is dead.

Dell has a strong brand and remains a powerful company.  It certainly is not dead, but I think if Michael Dell wants to correct the problems, he might want to transport himself back to 1997 and practice what he preached.