Yes, Joe Tucci is a great salesman and Michael Dell is the ultimate entrepreneur, but it is Google that is really behind the $67 billion merger. Tucci: “The waves of change we now see in our industry are unprecedented and, to navigate this change, we must create a new company for a new era.” In other words, we must survive in the digital natives era, ushered in by Google, and magnified by the likes of Amazon and Facebook.
To understand what Tucci calls “the new world order,” let’s take a quick tour of the old one, to better understand how the digital natives forced Dell and EMC into the largest tech acquisition in history. Dell and EMC were the two most successful U.S. stocks in the 1990s, appreciating more than any other stock over that booming decade. They rode on a new tidal wave of digital data, unleashed by the advent of the PC and the networking of PCs in 1980s.
As a result, between 1990 and 2000, the structure of the IT industry has changed for the first—and so far, the last—time, expanding to include large vendors focused on one layer of the IT stack: Intel in semi-conductors, EMC in storage, Cisco in networking, Microsoft in operating systems, Oracle in databases. IBM—the dominant player in the previous era of vertically-integrated, “one-stop-shopping” IT vendors—saved itself from the fate of DEC, Wang, and Prime (all, like EMC, based in Massachusetts) by focusing on services.
More of the Forbes.com post from Gil Press
