It seems that there are marriages that can resist any sort of shaking…
When we see the romantic turning in Dell’s and EMC’s love story, it comes to our minds the illustrative Clintons’ affair. Sort of an automatic link, we suppose, probably natural in our feverish minds.
Of course, we mean the most famous affair in the Clintons’ whole story, say, the Lewinski case. We understand the readers could be confused if we are not precise, so many affairs Bill Clinton was credited for.
Hard times for America, those years, when their Supreme Leader was pushed to the limit of potential impeachment, if we recall correctly… Unofficial accounts report him addressing American people right at the lectern, asking them to “prepare for hard and difficult times; times for Americans –not you, Monica, to grind your teeth and hold on tight”.
Surprisingly, at least in front of public audiences, Hillary stood by him all over. Admirable.
Years later, a declining Bill has left Hillary the stage, and he is more and more being known as The Secretary of State’s consort, while Hillary solves the world’s problems and enjoys the limelight.
Dell used to be, too, the Master of the IT industry some years ago, when its fragile business model of bringing cheap PCs, together with some Intelgate thing delivered short term results that outshone the marketplace. They were a kind of Supreme Leader market-share-wise.
Here and there they partnered around with EMC, who supplied the Storage solutions and capabilities Dell lacked. (As a side note, we could imagine that should Dell have had appropriate storage of its own, they would have recorded better the funding they got from Intel between 2001 and 2006).
So the IT industry had this nice couple, Dell + EMC, living a sort of honeymoon…
But then temptation happened to appear. The “younger” and less expert 3Par stepped up. Huh, this was indeed interesting for Dell. It was about novelty, it was about youth, it was about new practices.. it was sexy!
EMC held on. They kept cool head while considering their chances. “Don’t blow it!”, they said, “keep holding on!”.
In front of public audiences, EMC kept its head high, ignoring gossip. Dell kept on promising the earth and the moon to 3Par (couldn’t possibly promise the Sun too, as Larry Ellison was already building his own Solar System), but…
There was a big “but” in this story… Notice we wrote “but” with one “t” only, as there was a big “butt” too, though it was something different that HP would kick out later).
And the “but” was that Dell’s attempts where finally frustrated by the “big butt”, who, before it was turning to a fishy Fisherman, promised a bigger moon and a bigger earth plus assorted stars to dear 3Par.
Defeated, Dell turned back to heal its wounds, and, like Bill Clinton (unofficially) has been reported to tell Hillary after making love (“I’ll be home in 15 minutes, Hil”), they begged pardon from their former partner.
Hillary kept solemn silence in public, and as she had broader and certainly more ambitious goals of her own which Bill still could be some use for, she decided to pardon him and play again the respectable role of a respectable, reasonable and forgiving loyal wife.
EMC’s Tucci, CEO, is probably as well considering the use Dell can be of for the dollar revenue stream, despite Dell’s declining path in the last years… and probably will end up forgiving the sinner.
In a relatively short time from now, the once almighty Dell Inc will be known as just one of the guys that provided PCs for EMC deals… while the latter enjoys the sweet limelight its recent performance at Wall Street is showing.
As an Epilogue to the story… 3Par as well got its fifteen minutes of fame that according to Andy Warhol everybody deserves, and will be soon diluted among tins, crystal jars and pharmacist wares in Apotheker’s workshop. Same as formerly famous Lewinsky, who after fifteen minutes of embarrassing fame and another fifteen to clean up Bill’s DNA free samples, quietly disappeared in the shades of indifference.
So Big Mouth Larry, aka The Pontifex Maximus at the oracle, would be punished for his paranoia by knowing where the guy is, but not really being able to grab him, like poor old Tantalus, condemned by the Gods to starve in Hades below a rich fruit tree that raised it’s branches as soon as Tantalus tried to grasp any throughout eternity… which, for us at least, seems to be a heck of a long time, incidentally.
