Dell to Sell Itself for $24.4 Billion | Hacker News Reader

Dell to Sell Itself for $24.4 Billion

online.wsj.com

71 pointsforgingahead20 comments

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!

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

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.

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

Dell is getting out of the hardware business and into the solutions and services business.

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

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.

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.

How many times does this joke have to be made? And with this take over, he literally is giving money to the shareholders.

high five from Steve Jobs's spirit

Can't read the article. Paywall block.

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

https://www.google.com/search?q=Dell%20to%20Sell%20Itself%20...

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

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

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

If a site didn't let users see the content that matched their search query, Google would either not index it or would put it far into the results after the more useful links.

To avoid that, they have a deal with a number of paywalled sites called "First Click Free" that lets users who reach a site via search to access a limited number of articles through the paywall.

Requires. Acquires would be scary.

brainfart. :D

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.

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?

Can you tell me how this helped Avaya? I'd love to hear your perspective on the changes they made after going private.

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