That's all wishful thinking but culture and internal drivers matters a ton and I'm pretty sure the focus upon nothing but b2b and just bending for customers by relentless cost-cutting innovations rather than ones that are diversified are what led to their decline. Marc Andreessen was talking about how Opsware could have been AWS and I had to laugh so hard because if Amazon had released AWS with the kind of broken, unscalable software the Opsware product was about the time HP acquired it, they'd have met with the same success as the Amazon Fire Phone.

While Dell may have had a shot at being AWS and EMC in 90's and 2000's, it never entered into their mindset. They were PROUDLY claiming how they were not wasting money on R&D but rather simply churning out boxes of computers as cheaply as possible using innovations developed by others.

But it is good to see a possible competitor to AWS.

> They were PROUDLY claiming how they were not wasting money on R&D but rather simply churning out boxes of computers as cheaply as possible using innovations developed by others.

Yep. And the downward spiral of companies like HP was chasing them down that path.

That is partly because Intel beat them in many of their R&D though.

Apple? Samsung? Plenty of innovation from non-Intel.

Believe it or not one of the early thin/light Dell laptop that sold well was a rebadged Samsung laptop. It was Dell X1 laptop. 2.5lb laptop with 12inch screen in 2005, or even earlier.

I was thinking of the workstation/server market, though HP did have their Vectras back in the 1990s.

I dunno if the Windows OEM headed by the Guy Who Said Mean Things About Apple would have ever gotten any traction with SV startups.