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Michael Dell: the 39-year-old computer mogul on stepping down as CEO of the company he founded, why he doesn't play footsie with the press (hey!), and the product line he should have launched years ago.

Article Excerpt
Did you ever imagine the day would come, or come this quickly, when you wouldn't be CEO of the company you founded? When you start a company, you get all the jobs. You're the chief operating officer, you're the president, you're the CEO, you're the chairman. I've been gradually giving up my titles. But, you know, [chief operating officer and soon-to-be-CEO] Kevin Rollins and I have run the company together now for a long time, and we'll continue to run it, so it's not really much of a change in terms of my day-to-day activities.

If there's no material difference to how you're going to live your life, then why give up the title? It's a recognition of Kevin's achievements and what he's bringing to the company. We want to make sure he's well known and well regarded out there. But while it raises his star, it doesn't lower mine. It's good for the company and it's good for Kevin, but it doesn't hurt me.

No one would blame you, after as many years as you've put in, starting at an early age, for wanting to slow down. [Laughs] No, I'm not retiring. I'm continuing to work on a full-time basis. I'm not in any way reducing my commitment to the company. That's not what this is about.

Looking back over the twenty years since you started Dell, has the experience of being a CEO changed dramatically? Not only in terms of all the people being paraded in front of the cameras with raincoats over their handcuffs--I've never had that experience, fortunately.

--but in a larger sense. Is running a major company different than it used to be? We're so used to change on a massive scale that the change you're talking about might be more subtle. If I think back to what it was like for us ten years ago, we were a much smaller company. The change we see in our own business is actually greater than the change externally.

Give me an example of a change that we might not be able to see from the outside but that on the inside is momentous. Yesterday we had a town hall meeting for our small-business group, which sells to small businesses in the United States. We were congratulating them on the wonderful things they did last year. And I was pointing out to them that if their group was a company all by itself, it would be, like, number 250 on the Fortune 500 list, and it would be the same size as all of Dell about six or seven years ago--the whole company. So we've got a lot...

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