Michael Dell and Steve Jobs Comparison

Both Michael Dell and Steve Jobs have founded or co-founded companies that are topping the computer industry today. Dell is known for creating PC’s and PC accessories while Apple has isolated itself and created their own line of computers, phones, and other pieces of technology. Although one company dominates one half of the computer industry, the other works hard with and against others in the battle of PC’s.

Constantly told by his parents to study medicine, young Michael had no interest in the medical field. At the age of 12, he made $2,000 through a stamp auction. 3 years later, he bought an Apple computer just so he could take it apart and learn how it works. Then, when he was 19 years of age, he founded the company we see today, Dell, for only $1000. But thanks to inflation, that number isn’t as small as we see it today than it was way back when. Steve grew up completely differently than Michael did. He was put up for adoption by his birth parents and named by his adoptive parents, the Job’s family. When young, he would be with his father in the garage taking apart and reconstructing pieces of electronics. He also had trouble along the lines of schooling. He pulled many pranks in elementary school because it was boring to him and he was even bribed to study once. Although he was a big troublemaker, he tested so high that the administrators wanted him to move up to high school, but his parents declined. Years later, when he was in high school, he met Steve Wozniak. His future co-founder for Apple.

In 1976, when Steve J. was 2i years old, Steve and Steve got together and started to work on the Apple computer. Their company started off with Steve and Steve working in their parent’s garage, designing and building the Apple I computer. Their design was to make the computers smaller and cheaper so that everyday users could access one. With Wozniak’s design and Job’s marketing skills, the first apple computer went for $666.66 (Can’t stop grinning on the inside when I read this). The Apple I brought in $778,000 for the small company. 3 years after release, the Steves’ launched the Apple II, which increased the sales to $139 million. In 1980, the company became a publicly traded company. That was when Steve Jobs gave the position of CEO to John Sculley, the head of Pepsi-Cola and a marketing genius.

When he founded Dell at the age of 19, Michael was just making computers for other people at his college. He had a great customer support, cheap prices, and the computers were in good shape. He soon expanded his company to outside the college and soon afterwards he dropped out. In his first full year of business, 1984, he acquired a total of $6 million in sales. 16 years later in 2000, he became a billionaire and his company had offices in 34 different countries with over 1000 employees in each country on average. The next year, in 2001, Dell became the top PC manufacturer in the world, beating out Compaq Computer. He stepped down as CEO while remaining chairman of the board in 2004.

When Steve lowered his position in 1980, the company started to see various design flaws that caused the products to be recalled and users to become disappointed. In 1984, Apple released the macintosh, its attempt to fix the company. The macintosh was superior to the IBM computers, but it was still not compatible to the IBM computers. Sculley thought that this path Steve was taking was going to bring down the company so they pushed him out. He left the company in 1985 and created his own technology company called NeXT Inc. One year after, he bought out an animation company from George Lucas and invested $50 million into it. The company eventually became Pixar Animation Studios and merged with Disney in 2006. Pixar and NeXT both became very successful, and wound up being bought by Apple in 1996. Steve then got back into the CEO position of Apple. Apple then got back into the game with new inventions and technology like the iMac as well as new forms of marketing.

Dell started to run into errors soon after Michael dropped from CEO. Design flaws cost the company $300 million to fix, but the company dropped from the top. Michael returned as CEO in 2007, but the company has been neutral since. He spent the next years working on the company in order to fix the foundation. In 2013, he took his business private and in cooperation with Silver Lake Partners and Microsoft, Dell had a buyout of all outstanding shares.

The biggest difference that we can see between Steve Jobs and Michael Dell is the simple difference of PC and Macs. Macs are only made by one company, Apple, but they have to compete with PC’s Windows that the rest of the world runs off. Apple is like one against a hundred, but it has been able to stay up near the top. Dell on the other hand has to compete for their position, especially on the large PC side of the world. So an image someone could take out of this could be a war between two large countries, but the larger one is in the middle of a civil war of some kind. Another big difference is that one is alive and one is dead. Steve has lived his legacy while Michael is in the middle of his life and is continuing to run Dell. There are almost no similarities between any of them except for the fact that they both run/ran a company that manufactures computers and how they stepped down from the position of CEO only to return a few years later to help revive their company from the chaos they got into without them.

Sources:

"Michael Dell." The Biography.com Website. Ed. Biography.com Editors. A&E Networks Television. Web. 27 Sept. 2015. <http://www.biography.com/people/michael-dell-9542199>.

"Steve Jobs." The Biography.com Website. Ed. Biography.com Editors. A&E Networks Television. Web. 27 Sept. 2015. <http://www.biography.com/people/steve-jobs-9354805>.

#Technology #Essay