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Michael Dell on His Infamous ‘I’d Shut Down Apple’ Quote (2011)
- ggm 3y agoI tend to charitable, and this is a plausible interpretation. "I mis spoke" is oftentimes a crap apology, but in this case he did: he did a bad job of explaining his core motivations. "what would you do if.." questions, about competitors go straight to the jugular for a true believer. Somebody like Victor Kiam would run any company he could. Steve wasn't going to run any company apart from Pixar or Apple, he didn't want to re-shape IBM into AppleBM any more than Dell wanted to reshape Apple into Dellple. He answered the question contextually truthfully: given control of Apple he'd refund the cap and make Dell work, because he had no interest in running Apple. he just needed to say "I don't answer hypotheticals" or "I don't fantasise about my competitors, all I want to do is beat them" or something. I don't like Dell much. He's better than Oracles boss. It's notable there is NOT a giant litter puddle of Dell phones, Dell MP3 players, Dell self driving cars, Dell 3D headsets, Dell music store.. he sticks to his chops. I've owned Dell laptops and they were ok, I personally preferred Thinkpads and Macbooks but I know people who had good hard working life on his portables. I've helped run a cluster of research nodes and corporate on-prem and some DNS anycast infra (have done 20 years) on Dell rackables and they are industrial strength. I hate iDrac but that aside I have never regretted buying Dell blades or rack mounts (and I did have the authority to select vendor) Speccing up your own supermicro is better but if you can get a dell rep who will work with you, "I want a dumb HBA for ZFS" is perfectly cromulent. The equivalent HP and IBM have caused me much grief.