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What a difference ten years makes
Where were you on October 8, 1997?
Were you a starving college sophomore studying Russian literature? Perhaps you were an awkward junior-high student living in constant fear of gym class. Or maybe you were the CEO of a booming PC manufacturer cackling over what was presumed to be the dying gasps of Apple Computers.
Regardless of where you were, you should remember that date a decade ago. It may turn out to be one of the great foot-in-mouth moments of all time.
A bit of background: In 1997, Dell was on its way to a banner year. The company was riding a 47 per cent yearly growth in sales, and its stock price topped the S&P 500 ranking in year-over-year growth. Critics were hailing Dell's then-revolutionary direct marketing strategy and founder/CEO Michael Dell was flying high.
Apple, on the other hand, was in trouble. Years of sluggish sales and bad business moves had left the company teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Following Apple's purchase of NeXT, founder Steve Jobs had come back as CEO in an attempt to bring Apple off its deathbed...
Jobs actions were swift and drastic, ending all third-party licensing deals and striking a big-money deal with Microsoft. It seemed as if Apple was getting desperate.
On that fateful day in October, Michael Dell was speaking to a group of analysts when he was asked what he would do if he was put in charge of Apple.
"I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders," he quipped.
We all know what happened after that. Apple proceded to kick out two or three of the most iconic devices of the last 20 years (iMac, iPod, iPhone) while cheaper PC makers began to catch up to Dell and HP ultimately overtook it atop the PC heap.
Apple's stock is climbing to record highs, the company's market cap is more than twice that of Dell, which has had to call its founder back to perform its own Apple-esque revival.
Ten years later, Dell's jab at a dying competitor new enter the annals of bonehead comments, joining such memorable lines as Bill Gates "640k ought to be enough for anybody" and the IBM exec who told Xerox that "the market for copying machines is 5000 at most."
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