Dell, the man, prevails in quest to wrest Dell, the company, from Wall Street

So that's done, then. Shareholders of IT giant Dell have approved a $24.9bn private takeover bid put together by company founder Michael Dell, Silver Lake Partners, and borrowed dough from Microsoft and a slew of banks. Now Wall Street will be off Dell's back as it tries to reorganize itself for the future of computing, …

[sleepy]

I really thought mr Dell was aiming to be beaten by a better offer, and thus sell his remaining stock for a decent price. But apparently not. Dell was never a creative engineering company (apart, of course, from the financial engineering), and Michael Dell always shared an office with the CEO; it's been his show all along. The cash flow of recent years has been largely illusory; it's bought in like HP's: borrowed cash made to look like revenue by acquisitions shown on the balance sheet as goodwill etc.

I guess it's what he deserves, which is nice.

[Mr. Peterson]

I wonder if over time MS will see reason to increase its percent ownership of the new DELL. Perhaps it is already their intention to do so?

[ecofeco]

And "accelerate an enhanced customer experience"

A puzzler?

They can't just outright say their customer service sucks, now can they?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: And "accelerate an enhanced customer experience"

'enhanced customer experience' is code for personalized content backed by ads.

[beep54]

Re: And "accelerate an enhanced customer experience"

Apparently they really have been working on customer service. I have a friend (yeah, yeah, hearsay, I know...) that was buying a laptop and Dell (the company) just bent over backwards to please him. I've certainly found Dell's website totally useful for getting my machines up to date. Of course, I'm a wee prejudiced towards them as I went to UT and was very familiar with Dobie Tower (the original HQ).

[Homer 1]

Microsoft's next victim.

It makes sense that a company that only ever really existed to serve Microsoft, should in fact be owned by Microsoft. It would therefore also be poetic (albeit highly ironic) justice, were Dell to be subsequently destroyed by Microsoft, as seems inevitable if Dell stubbornly persists in clinging to such an outdated and incompetent "partner" - the very thing that put it in this position to begin with.

I had hoped that a liberated Dell might have chosen a more enlightened path but, given the "investment" it just accepted from Microsoft, that now seems highly unlikely, so it seems its fate is, just like Nokia's, fatally sealed.

[raving angry loony]

Excellent! Of course, the Microsoft connection is going to bite him hard at some point, probably fatally (see my comments and BBS posts here and elsewhere for the last, well, 25-30 years really...), but until then I can't wait to see what happens to a company like Dell if it doesn't have short-term thinking shareholders (hopefully) at the helm. Interesting experiment. I hope they recover from their abysmal short-term shareholder driven decisions of the last few years.