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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Koligman who wrote (133067)	6/16/1999 6:38:00 PM
From: mrknowitall	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

John - regarding Gerstner's comments about the scarcity of trained people and the impact on Dell in particular: On the one hand, I agree there is a scarcity - as evidenced by the activity in the headhunting community. On the other hand, what I think keeps people moving from job to job are factors like the "Dilbert" pointy-haired-boss management style of many companies and the get-rich-now schemes stock options offered in so many start up pre-IPO situations. Mr. K.

To: John Koligman who wrote (133067)	6/16/1999 9:39:00 PM
From: Meathead	Respond to of 176387

John, I don't know. Dell can add 30k people over the next several years but they absolutely can't do it in 1-2 years. Lou is right, the biggest problem in this industry is attracting scarce talent... one reason why stock options are necessary. Dell continually experiences growing pains of it's own and finding talent is one of their biggest challenges. Obviously one way to add skilled headcount instantly is to buy a company. However, we all know that the acquired company usually is overpriced, has a lot of dead weight and will present problems with merging the technical and cultural differences. In many cases, the time and cost associated with the acquisition does not live up to expectations. I see Dell's entry into higher end services as likely being a slow and controlled effort targeting the low hanging fruit first (whatever that may be). Within 5 years, they could possibly have a menu of offerings similar to the breadth of IBM's. Combined with hardware and other growth, Dell will likely be as big as IBM is today... ~80B/year and, IBM will be bigger, but not by the same ratio. MEATHEAD