Michael's bytes & chips were 'Dell-ightful'

NEW DELHI: It was direct from ‘Dynamite’ Dell. When Michael Dell and his giga-byte team stepped out from a cavalcade of black Mercs just in time for ET’s afternoon news meeting, they had their agenda down pat. The 42-year-old chairman & CEO of the $60-billion Dell was as direct as any guest editor ET’s had. His pitch was simple and as applicable to companies as to newspapers—cut out the complexity and make life easy for the customer.

Rather like the legendary Dell model of delivering direct to customers, he didn’t mince words when dwelling on the theme of the meeting—simplifying IT. “Right now there are so many different and unique architectures that you spend all your money maintaining them,” he said. “That’s true for hardware, software and systems integration and there are companies thriving on this complexity. It’s a fine business strategy but you can also make money-making things simple. Simplification can unleash a lot of value for customers.”

Make-it-simple was also the focus of Dell’s theme for the edition, with half-a-dozen commissioned stories analysing different tech trends. But then again, for the man who, by his own admission, has headed Dell for 20 of its 23 years, this is more than a business mantra. It’s the mission of a tech evangelist, something he hopes will take his company and the industry to the next growth level.

Mr Dell is clear he doesn’t want to perpetuate the complexity to grow his business. Unlike IT biggie IBM for instance. “They are masters of making things complicated,” he says. “You need to have an army of consultants to keep IBM systems running.”

Neither is he a fan of plans that might provide fodder for discussion. Take for instance, the much touted $100 PC being promoted by Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

According to reports, it might actually get to the market for $200, but does it still make sense? Here’s some Dellspeak on it: “It’s a good discussion point. I can make a computer for $100, but what use will it be? If I go to a village, they want food and water and not a $100 machine that’s just not good enough.”

Mr Dell’s focus is on practical things and one of his agendas is how the company can grow in many different ways. For instance, in the consumer business, Dell has put in a whole new structure. “We want to make the company more customer-centric and there are several key initiatives for this. We know that consumer growth around the world is enormous and that means new distribution channels, new products, new services, new brands. Today, we have over 10,000 locations around the world where you can buy Dell products. We’d like to expand that to India as well. There will be enormous growth in emerging markets and that will be a big factor in the growth of the industry.”

The next big trend will be a shift towards notebooks. Dell sees an acceleration in the shift from fixed to mobile computing. Particularly with fast wireless networks, people want to take their data with them and the cost of notebooks have come down. Hence the company’s huge focus on notebooks.

Just as important is Dell’s enterprise focus. “You have one billion users on the internet and 500,000 new users every day coming online for the very first time, most of them in emerging markets,” he says. “They all want to consume information, whether it’s your newspaper online, or media, television, advertising, social networking, videos, music. There needs to be an enormous number of mega data centres built with power-efficient servers and storage to feed all that information. So we’re building enterprise data centres of the future.”

India, he says, can grow faster if duties on imported IT products came down. “One reason why mobile has grown so fast is that import duty on mobiles is zero. Taxes need to come down on PCs,” he said. Finally, the big picture is also about the small guys. One of Dell’s key growth areas is small and medium-sized businesses. “The reason we call those out is because it goes back to entrepreneurship. Small and medium businesses is the big growth engine. You need new products, new services and new ways to reach out to them.”

With these new focus areas, Mr Dell—author of Direct From Dell, a book that tells the story of the company’s rise and the direct delivery strategies he refined—may yet be ready to write a sequel, perhaps, Partner with Dell. But before that he has to attend to serious business. Regain the mantle of the numero uno PC maker in the world, now held by arch-rival HP. That has actually forced him to return to lead the company.

So is he indispensable to Dell? “My mother definitely thinks so. If I look back to a year ago, I don’t think our company was doing as well as we could be,” he says. “The company was doing fantastic but I didn’t feel like we were exactly on the right path. We needed to make some strategy shifts and be quite decisive and even bold in our thinking. So, the board asked me to be the CEO once again. I’ve been CEO of the company for 20 years. So, I knew a bit and the company is only 23 years old. I’ve been CEO for most of its time.’’ Simple, isn’t it?