Dell’s Mindless Musings

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published

Michael Dell sent a memo to the staff of the company he founded, Dell (DELL).

According to The Wall Street Journal, it had some banal insights.

"The Direct Model has been a revolution, but is not a religion," Mr. Dell said in the memo. He added, "We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need." As if Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Apple, and Acer have not figured this out already.

The memo also takes a jab at competitors who "drive complexity and needless cost into customers’ environments," in an attempt to sell costly services with large numbers of consultants."These so-called "service divisions" create a never-ending cycle of activity with unclear return on investment," Mr. Dell writes. "We intend to break this cycle. We will build different kinds of services and offer key technologies that will help customers escape this complexity trap and unlock the true potential of technology."

Perhaps this is cynical, but does Dell have any special corner on "unlocking the true potential of technology". They may have a lot of competition on that.

Leaked memos like this do big companie no good. They make turnaround efforts seem like easy, quick fixes based on being able to repair things that competitors have already figured out.

Keep quiet, and get the job done.

Douglas A. McIntyre

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.

Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author 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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