Dell Computers

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 l

Michael Dell took Dell public in 1988 because the company needed the capital. Dell was only four years old and growing at like 80% per year. At the same time, the business was expanding into new countries and into new product lines.

A huge amount of revenue was coming in, but all the revenue is not profit. Dell was not a software company, so the sales could not finance the growth alone. The capital was for hiring more people, opening new offices, opening new factories, and building IT systems. Being a public company also helped Dell become more of a peer with customers, because customers could look and see a real legitimate company.

The public listing was helpful at the time. Dell absolute

Michael Dell says a letter from the Federal Communications Commission told Dell to stop making computers. Computers fall under a Class B device rule, so they have to be approved by the commission, and he did not know the rule.

The letter came in 86 or 87. Following the instructions would have put Dell out of business. Colleagues told him to call a lawyer in Washington who had been one of the prior commissioners. The lawyer said to go down to a test range, test the computers immediately, submit an application right away, and make sure the machines comply. Dell did all of that, and the lawyer then went to the commission and described the team as honest, forthright people.

Michael Dell says Dell's on-site service doubled sales after about three months.

Dell had decided the company had to differentiate on the basis of service and created on-site service. Back then, if a computer broke, the owner put it in the trunk of a car and took it back to the computer store. The store shipped it off somewhere, and the owner waited weeks and weeks and supposedly got it back. Before the internet, the customer called Dell on the phone. If Dell could not resolve the problem on the phone, Dell sent a technician with parts to the customer's location to fix the computer on site. Dell offered on-site service all across the United States.

Dell thought sales would double the minut

Michael Dell sold a 12 MHz 286 computer for $1,995 while IBM sold a 6 MHz 286 for $3,995. The Dell computer was twice as fast and half the price, and the company still made a decent margin.

In the mid-1980s, soon after the first engineers were hired to build Dell computers from scratch, Dell started selling so many computers so fast that it competed with IBM. Clever engineers and a supply chain built because the company had no capital made the pricing work. When Dell would sell, say, 200 computers in a day, the signal went back to suppliers, who delivered parts to the factory every day or every few hours, and Dell shipped the computers out to the customer. The supply chain was unbelievably

At about 17, Michael Dell made a little over $18,000 in a year mailing Houston Post offers to new marriage-license applicants.

Marriage-license filings were public, and an applicant gave the county court the address where the license should be sent. He built a direct mail program for a 16-county area surrounding Harris County, where Houston, Texas is. High school friends went to the county courthouses and typed the names into small Apple II computers, and he sent a large mailing to the applicants. A building boom was also underway in Houston, with large apartment and condominium complexes going up. He visited buildings under construction, found who was in charge, and said he was from the Ho

At 21, Michael Dell was already running a company making about $60 million a year. Guy Raz says that was just the beginning for Dell Computers. A college freshman turned a dorm room side hustle into one of the biggest computer makers in the world. While he was supposed to be in college, the dorm room business was already thriving: he bought computers, souped them up with more capability, and resold them. He advertised and bid on state contracts, and he does not really remember how he figured the work out.

Back in the 1980s, before people used the word startup and before founders such as Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, or Katrina Lake, the dorm room story people knew was Michael Dell's. Today

David Senra reads Bill Gates choosing software over hardware because manufacturing computers seemed too risky, while writing software took only brain power and time.

At Harvard, the daily rhythm looked extreme even to his friends. Between studying and programming he could be away for 36 hours. When exhaustion took over, he crashed for 12 or more hours, fully clothed, shoes still on, and he kept that up for months. Hardware would have meant buying parts, hiring people to assemble the machines, and finding lots of space. He was cooling on building hardware. Software needed no wires and no factories. It matched the work he already wanted, alone in a room and focused for 36 hours. He and Paul b