Consumer Electronics

Dell Shareholders Turn Against Michael Dell

The Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) board of directors must have adopted the philosophy that firing Michael Dell will not bring back the tens of billions of dollars that the company’s market cap has come down since the founder returned in January…

By Douglas A. McIntyre
Published August 18, 2010, 4:58am ET · 2 min read

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The Dell (NASDAQ: DELL) board of directors must have adopted the philosophy that firing Michael Dell will not bring back the tens of billions of dollars that the company’s market cap has come down since the founder returned in January 2007. It is a perverse defense of their decision to keep Dell, but it may be true. The firm’s prospects have been hurt so badly by poor management, which has caused a loss of its piece of the global PC market, that the firm’s stock price will never return to the $35 where it traded five years ago. The stock only goes above $12 occasionally at this point. Hanging Dell will not bring the company’s prospects back to life, they must think. Dell shareholders do not see it that way. Twenty-five percent of investors who cast votes for the firm’s recent proxy withheld their votes for Michael Dell to be CEO, a sign that they are tired of accounting scandals and shady business practices.

It is hard to remember when a founder’s term as CEO has been so vehemently objected to by shareholders, but it should send a message to the Dell board. Even in an age when stock owners have virtually no say over who runs the companies in which they hold shares, the PC maker’s governance is not up to the standards of a public company with standard board practices.

It is time to send Michael Dell home. Only his board has missed that. And it is, after all, his board

Douglas A. McIntyre

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Douglas A. McIntyre

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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