So Michael Dell is buying his own company back. This has been rattling around all week and I keep thinking about my first computer, which was a Dell. A gray Dimension tower with a CRT monitor so heavy I needed both arms to move it, bought from a strip-mall computer store in maybe 2001. It had a Pentium III in it and I thought it was the fastest thing on earth.
Tuesday it became official: Dell announced it's going private in a deal worth about $24.4 billion, with Michael Dell teaming up with Silver Lake Partners and, oddly, Microsoft chipping in a $2 billion loan to help make it happen. Shareholders get $13.65 a share. Its the largest leveraged buyout since the financial crisis, which is a sentence that felt impossible to write about a PC maker a few years ago.
Heres the thing that gets me though. Everyone's writing this up as "Dell goes private to escape Wall Street pressure and turn itself around away from the quarterly earnings spotlight," and sure, thats true, thats the official line. But read between the numbers for a second. Dell stock has been basically dead money for a decade. The company peaked around 2000 and has been sliding ever since PCs stopped being the thing everybody needed to buy every eighteen months. Going private doesnt fix that. It just means the slide happens somewhere reporters cant watch it happen in real time.
Im not trying to be a jerk about it. I get why you'd want to do this if you were Michael Dell. Public markets are brutal for a company thats trying to pivot into enterprise services and storage and whatever else, when your stock price is anchored to a PC business that peaked before the iPhone existed. Private equity lets you make ugly five-year bets without some hedge fund manager screaming about next quarter. Fine. Makes sense on paper.
But I dont think this saves the PC business, because I dont think the PC business is the kind of thing that gets saved. Its just not the center of anything anymore. My mom uses an iPad for basically everything now. My little brother does his homework on a Chromebook his school handed him. Nobody I know under 25 has bought a desktop tower in years, and when they do its usually for gaming, which is its own weird niche that Dell barely competes in outside of Alienware. The beige (well, gray, in my case) box on the desk is a dead format. It just hasnt finished dying yet, and this buyout is basically Michael Dell buying himself more time and more privacy to manage the decline instead of doing it under a spotlight.
I keep comparing it in my head to HP, which is still public and still getting torched every earnings call for its PC numbers, its Autonomy write-down mess, all of it. At least Dell gets to have its bad quarters in private now. Theres something almost merciful about that, in a corporate sort of way.
Anyway. Im typing this on a MacBook I bought in 2011 that I still like a lot, and Im not going to pretend Im heartbroken about the decline of the tower PC, because honestly the last Dell I owned ran so hot it warped a bit of the plastic near the vents and I had to prop it up on two hardcover books just to keep airflow going under it. Not exactly a golden era of engineering. But there was something about that machine being upgradeable, swap the RAM, swap the hard drive, pop in a better graphics card on a random Saturday, that Ive never quite gotten back from a laptop, and I dont think Ill get it back from whatever Dell turns into over the next five years as a private company either.
Feels like the end of something, is what Im trying to say, even if the something ended a while ago and this is just the paperwork catching up.
One unrelated thing before I go: I watched the first three episodes of House of Cards over the weekend since Netflix dropped the whole season at once last Friday, and putting all 13 episodes up on day one instead of doling them out weekly is going to mess with how people watch TV a lot more than anyone's giving it credit for right now. But thats a post for another day, my coffee's gone cold and I have actual paying work to get back to.