kemble, this one's for you.
On a recent, unusually warm afternoon in Detroit, Michael Dell laid out the Dell-on-the-Internet strategy for a meeting of the Economic Club of Detroit at the city's mammoth Cobo Conference Center. About 1,600 people paid up to $22 to listen to the 34-year-old CEO. After eating a lunch of chicken, rice, and cubed carrots, and chatting amiably with the man seated next to him, Kmart CEO Floyd Hall, Dell took the podium. Standing between two nine-foot-tall screens connected to his Dell Latitude laptop, Dell went though a speech customized for the Detroit crowd, in which he explained how the likes of GM, Ford, Caterpillar, Case, and Deere could significantly boost their return on assets by adopting Dell's Internet model. The crowd shifted in their seats as a slide compared heavy machinery's return on invested capital last year (13.7%) to Dell's (195%). But the highlight came when the prepared remarks were over. As listeners passed their questions up to the stage, the moderator looked at one and turned to Dell: "How will the Internet affect retailers like Kmart?" Floyd Hall's face turned beet red under his white hair. Dell paused, then reassured Hall, "The physical retailers won't go away." Not if they just put their trust in Dell.
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