Dell Owner Admits Rapid Rise of Tablets Surprised Him
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.
So people who were surprised by tablet sales in 2012 have not seen anything yet... 2012 was just the tip of the iceberg showing up on radar.
Amen to that. I'm in a cash strapped corporation right now. Instead of giving us the budget to buy the equipment we need to make products that can compete, we have to scrounge for OM1 fibre cables, use 10 year old servers and storage arrays, and produce products that are 2 years behind our competitors. All so they can give the shareholders more dividends while we wait around for some bigger company to buy us out for our old patents. Utterly stupid.
Hello Dutch East India Company!
My favorite.
@dgingeri - Really sorry to hear. It's sad that you are in such a situation. Best of luck to you. I've seen that and it is becoming more commonplace than previous. It should never be that way.
Yes, Tablets only work now and not years ago due to faster internet, social media, and App market modeled after Apple. Years ago tablets failed because the internet was slow and was very limited in its usefulness. Today I can do a large portion of what I do on my PC with my iPad. Dell like many companies lack vision and only rely on bread and butter sales within a proven market.
Mouse? Strictly TEXT display here...
Other than taking notes...I think older people like tablets because of the intuitive interface.
Tap the item you want...and it works...
When you put an older person in front of a PC (or laptop) with a mouse and keyboard they spend most of the time staring at either. All those buttons...what if i hit the wrong one? Do i click once or twice? Do I have to hit enter?
Ever see an older person learning to double click? Heh...a nice slow double click with mouse movement...they end up dragging and dropping (into the trash, another folder...) the item.
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.
I'm surprised your comment hasn't been modded into oblivion like mine usually are when I try to remind people that most people do not need an i5 or even an i3. Core2Duo E8xxx can still run most modern games reasonably well, just not the more extreme titles.
The new generation of tablets and smartphones is powerful enough to handle most of these people's everyday needs, just need the actual software those people want to run on their preferred platform(s) and hook up a keyboard, mouse, external storage and external display if necessary.