“This is fun for me,” Michael Dell says. “If you told me I couldn’t do this, I’d be depressed.”
The head of one the biggest technology companies in the world is candid about his motivation for growing the company he founded 32 years ago in his college dorm room.
“I’m tremendously excited about the role of technology in changing the world,” he says. “When I look at what’s happened in the last 30 years, there’s been a lot of progress in the world. There’s a lot of bad things in the world, but there’s been a tremendous amount of progress and to me it mirrors the rise of the microprocessor.
“Somebody in Africa for $30 can hold a device in their hand right now and have more information than the president of the United States had 25 years ago. It’s amazing. I get to have a front-row seat in that and be very involved in that.”
Michael Dell took the company private in 2013 after a much publicised battle with some of the company’s investors. With partner Silver Lake, the company’s founder pulled off the $25 billion buyout.
Since then, Dell has described itself as the biggest start-up in the world. While it may not fit the traditional perception of start-up in terms of size, it has adopted the principles of agility and innovation that can be attributed to smaller firms.
That led to Dell’s bid for storage firm EMC, a $67 billion offer that if accepted by shareholders will be the largest technology merger ever.
The deal has had mixed reactions, with some criticism about the move. The most notable was that of HP chief executive Meg Whitman.
“From an instinctual standpoint, it doesn’t feel right to develop our strategy from looking at our competitors. It just doesn’t feel like a good idea to me,” Dell says. “When I develop strategy, what I do is I go talk to customers.”
Quite what that strategy will mean for the global combined workforce is too early to tell.
While the prospect of a merger may sometimes result in a large number of jobs losses, it’s not apparent that this will be the case with the Dell/EMC bid. It may especially worry the companies’ combined Irish workforce, which currently stands at more than 6,000.
