back to article Shareholders tell Mike 'Just Do It': Dell to go PRIVATE for $24.9bn

Dell shareholders have given the green light to Mickey D to take the company he founded nearly three decades ago private – again. Approval from investors was never really in doubt after activist investor Carl Icahn, who seems more interested in Apple, revealed that he and partner SAM had given up the ownership battle, clearing …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Flame

    Now for the fire sale

    PC division to be sold and big lay-offs.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Now for the fire sale

      As far as I can see there's a lot of PCs still bought by businesses. Doing anything productive on a tablet isn't as easy.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Now for the fire sale

        That as may be but the profit margins are crap. Dell make far more profit on their servers and associated software sales which is where they will be focusing in the future.

        1. Tom 13

          Re: the profit margins are crap.

          I expect that's true on the consumer side. Business, probably not so much.

          Businesses try to cut costs, but they understand their vendors need to make a profit too. The overall relationship is critical to the business culture, and a long term, stable relationship with quality merchandise at low but not cut-rate prices will usually be better for both parties in the long run.

  2. Daniel B.
    Happy

    Nice!

    Seeing a company survive an Icahn takeover brings a huge smile to my face. Even if Dell isn't quite so great, it's good to see it go private.

  3. M. B.

    The guys...

    ...on the enterprise side are pretty pumped, already spoke with my account manager and the consensus is good things for their piece of the puzzle, especially in terms of investment into their current portfolio.

    I don't know if things are quite as rosy on the consumer side though.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The guys...

      I know what I'd like to see: A cheap as (ARM) chips suite of (ph/t)ablet, netbook, laptop and micro desktop all with nice high-res screens, sharing as much common SoC hardware & driver architecture as possible (even with server parts wherever reasonable) and all defaulting to Android. Neat, functional, commodity consumer kit at commodity consumer prices. None of the usual "oooohhh look... the keyboard falls off if you pick it up (add $100)", "powered by Intel's latest Jizzwell core(tm) i76637 (add $300)", "Microsoft loss-leader home productivity 8.1 trial installed free (add $50 TO EVERYFUCKINGTHING THE COMPANY SELLS)" shit, ta very much.

      Natch a "premium" Intel workstation and "mobile workstation" should be included too... for those who want/need... perhaps even a little atom thing as Intel seems to want to so much... but ONLY if the licensing DOES NOT disrupt the IMPORTANT (see above) stuff. We all know how the industry is maturing... jostling the fray to sell a handful of grossly overpriced "ultrabooks" is probably nice enough but cornering a vast new consumer phenom is Shirley nicer - even if the margins are low. ...and Dell knows a thing or two about low margin consumer kit, doesn't it?

      Of course, RT can come to the party too, provided M$:

      1) Drop their illegal cartel "it must be impossible for the consumer to install anything but windows" racket.

      2) Pay Dell $30 for every machine shipped - not just the ones running windows, natch. ;)

      I'm inclined to think Dell (the man) might like to see that too... and if anyone is positioned to pull such a coup I'm inclined to think it's Dell (the company)... no expectations of course but fingers are crossed!

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So Lenovo are laughing all the way to the bank, HP might get a bit more life out of their box-slinging arms and a million sysadmins the world over are about to scream in anguish as they realise they're going to have to start replacing all that desktop Dell kit.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The Business PC market doesn't have to make a profit it just shouldn't make a loss. That how you stop a competitor getting a foot in the door!! Dell won't sell off that part of the business his business model only buys what he needs to build the orders on the books. The consumer PC market has no profit in it at all. Lenovo, HP and everyone else in that Market will have to change or they will lose out. Tablets and Mobiles may bring in a lot of money but they currently are not the best thing to do business work on but that may change with the new range of processors from Intel and ARM. Hopefully developers will start to make more software that can be used in the office. The majority of stuff available for them isn't very good!

    Dell makes his money from Enterprise but wants to take a bigger chunk of the services market which still has a lot of profit in it. I would expect to see this grow as there is investment and integration of the current portfolio. Dell has a lot more solutions available than most people are aware of they have an almost complete portfolio in Enterprise solutions.

    They do Cloud / Convergence / Clustering / DAS / NAS / SAN including flash arrays / Backup (tape and disk) / Networking (convergence, active fabric, iSCSI) / Servers / Blades / Racking / Unified storage (block and file on SAN) / HPCC / Dense Arrays / Active Active arrays and a huge array of software that is being integrated into the brand.

    For all the people who knock the Indian call centres the guys in Ireland and Scotland provide a great service. EMC may be the market leaders in the datacentre but they over price, over spec and don't deliver what they usually say they can.

    I think Dell will grow now they don't have to worry about the shareholders demanding their pound of flesh.

    1. M. B.

      The first thing they need to do is revamp their entire support model for the Enterprise line to match their Copilot support model. I've never had a BAD Dell experience, but my Copilot experience has ALWAYS been above expectations.

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