Rumor: Dell Itching to Buy a Company
Dell is sitting on a big stack of cash and looking to go shopping.
Several reports today say that computer giant, Dell has $10 billion to spend on an acquisition it will make in the coming months. According to WSJ, Dell officials have publicly said they want to do more deals, and an anonymous source has said CEO Michael Dell expects his company to acquire a "significant-sized company" in coming months, according to a person who has spoken with the CEO.
So where is all this money talk coming from? WSJ reports that on Wednesday, Dell sold $1 billion in bonds, adding to the $9 billion it already had. While the paper suggests that Dell wants to expand its data-storage and tech-services businesses, citing sources who have spoken to CFO, Brian Gladden. However, others are coming back to rumors from earlier in the year that suggested Dell might be considering buying Palm.
March was filled with reports about Dell’s plans to produce at least one, if not two smartphones. Word on the street was the company was planning on making one touchscreen phone and one with a full QWERTY keyboard. One would run WinMo and one on Google’s mobile OS, Android. However toward the end of the month, analysts began speculating that Dell may be considering a Palm buyout in order to get a jump on the smartphone market. However, now that Palm has launched the Pre, we can't imagine the company selling up before it gets a chance to see the fruits of its labor over the last couple of years.
Businessweek has a number of suggestions for Dell's mergers and acquisitions team:
- Palm
- Motorola’s phone unit
- Affiliated Computer Services
- BMC Software
- Symantec
- EMC
Which of these is most likely? Place your bets.

I think dell should spend their 10 billion into using better computer parts. every Dell has been sucky for me.
yuk!!
Dell has gotten better (A little.) My Dell Studio Slim works just fine and my sister loves her Studio notebook.
you'll have to fight me for that right.
in other words, if its in the office area, use it for office stuff only.
however, i did have a huge problem with a Dell PC i was workin on with a friend. it was an XPS 7** [forget the model number, 760 maybe?] they had the processor i7 overclocked to about 3.7gHZ, way to high for system stability because it went down as soon as a game pulled up. After replacing the whole entire PC 1 component at a time, after i had told them it was their setup, they finally sent out a new one with the same problem. This new one they sent out was 3.7gHz as well, so we sent it back. The third one that came out worked like a charm, nice and fast. 2x GTX285's and 4 Gigz DDR3 ram. however, the processor was 3.4ghz OC'd.
I really hope they be more careful next time i see anyone buy an XPS model, i mean honestly putting it at the tippy top of the performance graph is ok but if it even goes over an inch it falls into instability. I do note however that the 2 cards were placed right on top of eachother and ran about 84C in game. It was stable i guess, just a little warm. i dont understand sacrificing quality for the sake of a little extra noise in the system. that's mainly why i dont trust dell i guess.
We can share.
To Party?
Dell's crap and everything it buys turns crap.
Dell makes shit, Asus makes awesome tech...
Though buying out or atleast buying as much of the company as they can, would likely help improve all Dell products substantially. Nothing a little R&D can't fix.
However it would be a shame if they brought Asus to the same level of shit they are in themselves, and if they stopped investing in R&D.
Hey Dell! Since you have $10B to spend. How about taking some of that money to create good jobs for good people and not hire criminal inmates for contract work? Build new systems so you can operate in the US effectively and maintain strong profitability with little to know outsourcing. Spend more money on R&D to create more products internally rather than re-brand. Grow some balls and create novel software and even your own OS. There's a lot of money you can spend on yourself... stop buying other companies out. We don't need another M$ or IBM. What we need is an agile company that still has a decent reputation, cash, and for it to innovate organically.
And if your run out of ideas - I have a couple of business plans for you to peruse. Seriously. PM me.