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 t

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.