Dell Computer

Nowadays, you can’t go through a newspaper or a magazine without seeing at least one Dell Computer Ad. They seem to be everywhere! Take your local tabloid, and Dell Computer is prominently splashed on the back cover. Get online, and one in five banners is selling you a Dell computer. There’s a Dell computer on a billboard, a Dell computer on a blimp and a Dell computer even in a coupon booklet! Dell Computers today is an omnipresent, omniscient entity.

But back in the early 1980’s, nobody had ever heard of Dell Computer. That was because, in those days, Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Computers was in college, studying to be a doctor. Of course, like most intelligent youngsters in those days, he dabbled in computers – the emerging technology that was changing the way people worked. But this dabbling was more than a mere hobby and the young Michael Dell began assembling and selling his own brand of computers from his hostel room. These were the very first examples of what we have come to know as the Dell Computer.

In the process of making and selling his Dell Computer, Michael Dell had stumbled upon what has come to be known as the made to order revolution. The premise behind every Dell computer was simple. By procuring the parts at a wholesale price and assembling them as and when an order came in, the middlemen in the computer business could easily be eliminated. This was common sense. What was uncommon however was the amount of savings that such a straightforward tactic could result in. Even the largest computer manufacturers of the day did not realize that the bulk of their production cost was going to middlemen. Michael Dell did, and it resulted in Dell Computers becoming a household name.

Dell Computer which started in the year 1984 with a meager thousand dollar investment by Michael Dell has today grown into a multi-billion dollar corporation with a presence in over 40 countries of the world. Although Dell computers employs thousands of people, the vast majority of them are in the computer manufacturing side of the business. There is nothing more than a nominal presence in the retail aspect of the Dell computer business. Dell’s built to order methodology has also succeeded in giving consumers with better value for money as any savings made in part procurement, lack of inventory overheads and absence of a hefty retail mark-up can be passed on to the consumers.

And if his ads are any indication, Dell is doing very well indeed! Without salesmen pitching his products, without dealers stocking them, without warehouses distributing them, if Dell computers has been able to able to carve a market share for itself among the more established players like IBM, HP and others, it is indeed a testimony for the power of e-tailing over retailing. And Michael Dell should know. Not only was he the youngest CEO to earn a spot on the Fortune 500, he continues to sit as a full member on the US Government’s President Advisory Council on Science and Technology.