What Was Dell's Olympic Project?

Olympic was Dell's wildly ambitious engineering program. The technical leap was too big, and the project failed.

Michael Dell says Dell Unix was a software product Dell created in 1989, before the Linux wave. Unix was already a well-used operating system in mid-range computer systems. Dell was really early, and Dell Unix was a really bad idea and a horrible misadventure. It cost the company money and affected the stock price. Dell also had problems with inventory control early on, among other mistakes. Fortunately, none of them were fatal.

He learned long ago to fix a problem as fast as he finds it. Pioneering a new area with a new business model leaves no playbook. The way through is to learn by doing, intuit, and experiment.