On October 6, 1997, in response to the question of what he’d do if he was in charge of Apple Computer, Dell founder and then CEO Michael Dell stood before a crowd of several thousand IT executives and answered flippantly, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”
A little more than a month later, on November 10, 1997, new Apple Interim CEO (iCEO) Steve Jobs responded, speaking in front of an image of Michael Dell’s bulls-eye covered face, “We’re coming after you, you’re in our sights.”
On January 13, 2006, after a little more than eight years of hard work, Apple Inc. passed Dell, Inc. in market value, $72.13 billion vs. $71.97 billion at market close, respectively.
On July 27, 2007, Apple’s value doubled that of Dell’s, $127.81 billion vs. $63.65 billion, respectively.
On December 6, 2007, Apple’s market value passed 3 times that of Dell’s, $165.66 billion vs. $54.42 billion, respectively.
Today in NASDAQ trading, Apple rose $6.05, or 3.48%, to close at $180.00 and the company’s market value passed 4 times that of Dell’s, $158.66 billion vs. $38.97 billion.
Got any snappy retorts now, Mr. Dell? What’s that, cat got your tongue?
AAPL and DELL quotes via NASDAQ are here.
LOVE IT!
Don’t Be Like Mike
Stupid asshat Michael Dell has this coming to him. With any luck, that insulting will get out of the business to ‘concentrate on his family’ …. or whatever.
Carry your ass, Dell.
While I love that Apple’s value is 4x that of Dell, Apples net value has remained at a plateau for the last year or so (~$160 Billion) while Dell has shrunk from ~$70 Billion to $39 Billion! Dell is rapidly loosing what little inherent value it has as a company. Dell does NOT have an innovation stream and is no simply competing against other simple commodity PC manufacturers where it is simply “how cheap can I make this”.
Yea but, Dell has such a huge share of the market, doesn’t market share mean everything?
Say good night, Michael!
Karma is a bitch eh mickey?
How d’ya like them apples Mikey?
Bring back the dude!
Dude, you’re getting irrelevant.
Anyone know where i can find a picture of Jobs w/ Dell and the Bullseye??
What has happened to Dell as well as the person who started Gateway is both the fault of PC mfgs as well as Microsoft. First as someone who used to work on a Dell at work I can say that their products for the most part at garbage. In order to keep lowering prices they have gone to really cheap components.
Now is I remember wasn’t Vista supposed to drive hordes of consumers into retailers to upgrade their PC’s? Only one problem with that someone forgot to tell them ! Windows stopped being cool a long time ago and the failure of Vista is surely one of the reasons for the fall of Dell & Gateway.
Bill needs to bet back to the MS campus and lease an office somewhere away from Richmond where a bunch of developers can go off site and reinvent Windows so that’s it cool again. Meanwhile OSX continues to gain share and Apple stock is up again courtesy of MS.
Snappy retort:
I think Dell will blend.
Volume is vanity.
Profit is sanity.
Interesting that Dell has closed, is closing and vastly shrinking it’s tech support and sales centers staffed by Dell Employees. Once all the people from the Dell corporate ranks have been let go and Dell is relying on mostly contracted outsourced Support and Sales, how long will it be before they start to slip to the number 5 computer manufacturer spot?
Digg It like crazy!!!
http://digg.com/apple/Apple_now_worth_quadruple_Dell_s_market_value
Bill needs to bet back to the MS campus and lease an office somewhere away from Richmond where a bunch of developers can go off site and reinvent Windows so that’s it cool again. Meanwhile OSX continues to gain share and Apple stock is up again courtesy of MS.
I don’t even know where to start on this one…
Richmond?
This guy deserves what he gets, though I truly feel sorry for all the workers that are losing their jobs and Im sure there will be more to come.
At the time he made that statement, I’m sure he thought nothing could ever touch him, he was on top. As Canada Mark said, they do lack an innovation stream, so they have nowhere to go but down, and ultimately there is going to be no way out.
Karma is a bitch! Good luck Mike, you are so going to need it.
Something about Mike looks
” rel=”nofollow”>familiar…
I meant Redmond…sorry but still the thought remains. Microsoft needs to make Windows cool again ! Now I have heard that Microsoft can’t do this because Windows PC’s have too many third party components blah blah but the fact of the matter is that if Microsoft reinvented Windows with an OS that was cool and worked great a lot of people would, I believe, be willing to upgrade..until then people want to keep XP
“Karma is a bitch eh mickey?”
He aint talking smack about Apple no more! hehe
I think Micheal Dell might be a good prospect to replace Ballmer at Microsoft.
Considering how he has turned DELL around, he should be able to take microsoft to the next level(down that is)
What do you think?
I really appreciate that you guys have a long, long memory. I love how you pull out these quotes and, deservingly, fling it back in their faces. I remember when Michael Dell made that comment and how angry it made me. With Apple riding high today it’s validating that we stood by Apple and Mac all these years, because it was a little scary back in the late 90s. I mean, we know the Mac is better, but if I could not get my employer to let me use one at work then what! I had decided back then that if Apple shutdown it’s Mac business that I would quite design and do something else rather than sell out and use Windows after Microsoft rose to dominance through illegal means. Now all we have to worry about is Apple being big that they loose focus, which I don’t think will happen as long as Steve is there. Thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Rich Apple Person has landed.
When does Laura Goldman weigh in on this?
Windows was never ‘cool’.
No, it wasn’t.
If you were walking around in 1990 saying “Windows is so cool!” then you had normal people calling you a computer geek, and computer geeks making fun of you for running gimmicky Windows instead of good ol’ DOS.
I saw a t-shirt back in those days I will never forget:
Double Your Hard Disk Space: Delete Windows!
Yeah, well screw you guys.
I’ve had a perfectly wonderful year.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t it.