The real Dell 2.0

C|Net | at | by Mike

When, in 2006, Dell first started talking about reinventing itself under the "Dell 2.0" moniker it seemed as if "Dell 1.2" would have been a more apt tagline. Michael Dell himself admitted that "Dell 2.0 is about evolving, not revolution." Dell 2.0 was seemingly still very much tied to a historic PC worldview and remained suspicious of all but the most nominal of research and development investments.

Since that time, we've seen significant change in the IT industry. Hewlett-Packard acquired EDS and 3Com. Oracle bought Sun. Cisco and EMC got cozy. EMC brought its VMware subsidiary closer. In short, the big IT vendors collectively swung the pendulum away from the horizontal mix-and-match layers that characterized the industry since the rise of distributed computing in the 1980s. Rather, the "New Horsemen" seek to deliver integrated hardware and software stacks that shift the effort of making things work together from the customer to the vendor and, not incidentally, gives the winning vendor a bigger slice of the IT pie.