Two years on, Dell shows going private was a smart move

In 2012 Lenovo released the Thinkpad X1 Carbon as part of Intel's Ultrabook initiative. It was thin, it was light, and it boasted Levovo's excellent build quality and reliability. Windows users jealous of the MacBook Air finally had a thin-and-light to call their own. Around about the same time Dell updated to its own business line of notebooks, the best of which was the Dell Latitude E6430s. While it managed to cram a 14-inch screen into a 13-inch chassis, it was hardly a desirable laptop. At 2.68cm thick (it still had an optical drive) and around 2kg when kitted out with a much-needed 6-cell battery, it wasn't exactly a particularly portable one either.

A year later, in September 2013, Dell founder Michael Dell and a group of investors from Silver Lake succeeded in taking the company private in one of the largest corporate privatisations in history. While there's no doubt that a slowing PC market had plenty to do with its falling share prices at the time, it was clear Dell's product range had fallen behind the times, despite some success in the consumer market with the XPS 13. It was a pretty bold move, considering Dell had been a public company for 25 years.

"We find ourselves in a world increasingly afflicted with myopia—governments that can't see beyond the next election, an education system that can't see beyond the next round of standardised tests, and public financial markets that can't see beyond the next trade," wrote Michael Dell in the Wall Street Journal in 2014. "This was what Dell faced as a public company. Shareholders increasingly demanded short-term results to drive returns; innovation and investment too often suffered as a result. Shareholder and customer interests decoupled."

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