Michael Dell and the big turnaround

The technology world is brutal. Companies that have been enormously successful in riding one tech wave often find themselves ground to the dust when a new wave comes along. The history of the global information technology industry is littered with the graves of once great companies that failed to keep up with changing times.

Dell Computers is one of the survivors that rode the original IBM-compatible PC wave and managed to successfully reinvent itself when that market became a low-margin commodity play. IBM sold off its PC division long ago when it realised it could not run it profitably. Compaq, one