Michael Dell didn't expect to see businesses adopts tablets instead of PCs so quickly.
As his company goes private via a $24.4 billion deal, Dell founder Michael Dell has admitted that the rapid rise of tablets has surprised him.
The emergence of the tablet market is widely believed to have been the cause of the PC industry's market decline. "I didn't completely see that coming," Dell said, adding that he did not expect to see businesses ditch PCs in favor of adopting tablets in such a short period of time.
During October 2012, tablet display shipments surpassed that of notebooks. In 2013, global tablet shipments are expected to surpass notebooks by approximately 33 million units at over 240 million units.
Dell, meanwhile, was once the dominant force in the PC market. However, its fortunes have continuously declined with emerging technologies. In a bid to revive the company's performance in the market, it recently completed a $24.4 billion deal to take it private.
It was financed by current CEO and founder Michael Dell, private equity firm Silver Lake, and debt financing from a consortium of banks, while Microsoft contributed a $2 billion loan.
The beauty of a privately-owned company is that they can do whatever they please rather than having to bend to the will of share-holders and a short-term-profit-hungry board of directors that make terrible business decisions. You know, like HP.
The beauty of a privately-owned company is that they can do whatever they please rather than having to bend to the will of share-holders and a short-term-profit-hungry board of directors that make terrible business decisions. You know, like HP.
2) The rise of tablets caught him by surprise because most tech geeks have been in denial about the low-end consumption-only market. You first saw it with netbooks, which the technocrati constantly criticized, made fun of, and dismissed. Most of the reveled when netbook sales began to decline, citing it as proof that they were right all along (while ignoring the tablet sales which took their place).
News flash: Tech geeks comprise only about 5% of the population. The other 95% doesn't care how many GHz your CPU runs at, how many cores it has, nor how many FPS you can get in Skyrim. They just want something which lets them browse the web and read their email, maybe occasionally play a movie or some music. If you make something which appeals to that 95%, you only need to exert 1/20th the effort before your sales will match what you'd get selling something which appeals to the 5% who are tech geeks. Apple understands this perfectly, which is why they load up their products with frivolous "fashion" features that tech geeks dismiss. A glass back, a minimalist appearance, svelte tapering at the edges to make it look thinner. These mean nothing to the tech geek, but the masses absolutely love it. And they make gobs of money doing it because those masses are 95% of the population.