When a fifteen-year-old Michael Dell met Steve Jobs; says: I didn’t know that in five years, we will not be…
Long before Dell became a byword for beige office towers and before Apple became the most valuable company on earth, a fifteen-year-old boy sat in a Houston meeting room and watched a 25-year-old Steve Jobs walk in. The year was 1980. The boy was Michael Dell, four years away from starting a PC business out of a University of Texas dorm room with a thousand dollars and three guys with screwdrivers.In his memoir Play Nice But Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader, Dell writes that Jobs in person was far more compelling than Jobs in print, and that when he entered the room it felt as though the waters parted. Dell ends the passage with a line that lands harder in hindsight than it could have at the time: he was fifteen and riveted, and he could not have begun to imagine that in five years he and Jobs would be not only colleagues but friends.The Apple II that Michael Dell took apart before he took notesThe obsession started a year earlier. In 1979, Dell begged his parents for an Apple II, which cost around $1,298 then. He unboxed it, admired it, and immediately pulled it apart to see how it worked. His logic was simple. You have to take something apart to understand it. The Apple II obliged, with clearly marked chips and books explaining what each one did.That mix of curiosity and commerce was already there. Dell had been selling Houston Post subscriptions in high school, using marriage licence records to target newlyweds, and made about $18,000 in a year doing it.What Steve Jobs actually said at that 1980 Houston user group meetingJobs was speaking at a moment when Apple was about to go public and was preparing the Apple III, pitched internally as the sequel that would do for the Apple II what the Apple II had done for the Apple I. He spoke about the personal computer, and specifically his personal computer, as something that would revolutionise the world.The metaphor Dell remembered was a transport one. For the capital investment of a passenger train, Jobs said, you could buy a thousand Volkswagens, and the difference was that those thousand people could go where they wanted, when they wanted and with whom they wanted. Computing, in other words, was about to stop being something you queued for.Dell writes that Jobs was saying people would gain the capacity to accomplish the unimaginable. He was fifteen. He believed it.From Apple fan to Apple’s archenemy, and back to friendsThe five years Dell mentions did pass, and the two men did become friends, though the public record mostly remembers the fights. In 1993, Jobs drove to Dell’s house in Texas repeatedly to pitch the NeXT operating system for Dell PCs. Dell passed, citing no applications and no customer interest. In 1997, back at Apple, Jobs showed Dell a Dell desktop running Mac OS on Intel silicon and offered to license it. That collapsed over money, because Jobs wanted a royalty on every Dell PC sold, not just the ones running Mac OS.Then came October 6, 1997, when Dell was asked what he would do with Apple and said he would shut it down and return the money to shareholders. Jobs emailed him a one-liner about class. Weeks later he put Dell’s face on a keynote screen and told the room Apple was coming after him.Dell now calls the remark stupid and unprofessional. The fifteen-year-old in the Houston meeting room would probably have agreed.
