"Largest PC maker" has been a pyrrhic title for many years now. Lenovo's market cap is $8 billion, Dell's is $51 billion.

Most of Dells market cap is the 87% of vmware it owns (67 billion)

Yep.

And the value of Dell's business isn't in selling PCs, it's in other services around the PC.

And IBM's is currently $117 billion.

Lenovo's margins are still razor-thin. The thing that bothers me most about IBM keeping POWER and Z is that I can't afford either, because the margins are eye-watering.

Fine, thin margins. So grow your market share and revenue, which is exactly what they did.

Since ~2005 they have ~5x'ed their revenue. Which is pretty significant if you consider one of IBM's big problems has been declining revenue. Proving the problem with the business wasn't the business itself but IBM management.

Lenovo is chinese, right? How many other (big) chinese companies have been through Dell's cycle as you describe it?

Where is Dell making its computers? When I track shipments they seem to be coming from China.

I don't think they make their own hardware. They design it and then farm out manufacture.

Clayton Christensen has written and talked about how Dell sold their business piece-by-piece. Each individual step seemed like a good move - it lowered costs and increased profits. Until one day the companies they outsourced to had it all and they started selling better computers for less money than Dell.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/18/clayton...

It's interesting that the difference between that and Apple is that since Apple controls the OS, nobody else can make a Mac.

Unfortunately for Dell, anyone can make a PC.

What do they even design? All of the components inside their computers are off the shelf products from other companies.

Speaking of their servers, their motherboards and chassis seem to be of their own design. Often times these layouts are pretty proprietary and designed exactly around the design of the chassis. They do some level of customization of firmware on the devices they go with, as there's usually Dell firmware on things like hard drives which integrates more with their own management tools. Arguably their software stack of actually managing fleets of their hardware is something they design, along with the actual remote access controller systems they put on the boards.

Dell desktop workstations have custom cases and mobos and power supplies, at the very least. Laptops are custom cases and often SoC.