Dell: Dull and Diligent

Michael Dell is not a technology visionary. He's a business visionary, and that's good.

Silicon Valley doesn’t fully understand Michael Dell. He doesn’t dream about virtual worlds, what comes after the Cloud, or the next iPhone. He’s no Andy Bectholsheim, Steve Jobs, or Larry Ellison.

Dell dreams about things like cutting IT budgets. "We're making a public commitment to take $200 billion out of IT spending," he announced at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco Tuesday.  That’s his version of a Jobsian “one more thing.”

Later in the eventing at a Churchill Club gathering, he fielded no fewer than four questions about Dell’s roll in tech innovation, each one eliciting responses like this from the smiling multibillionaire: 
“Those of you who are involved in standards committees will know that we play an active role in standards committees.”

“What!?" one could almost hear the questioners respond. “I invite you to blow my mind with some crazy image of a new device that will change how we live, and you give me standards committees?” Interviewer Don Clark of the WSJ and audience members made gentle several softballs all to no avail.

The Valley likes a steady diet of imaginative diversions: Twitter and Facebook and Google Wave—products that are fun to think about.  Meanwhile, Dell champions a return to the same-old. His response to the Netbooks trend was typical:

"If you take a user who's used to a 14- or 15-inch notebook and you say 'Here's a 10-inch netbook,' they're going to say 'Hey, this is so fantastic. It's so cute. It's so light. I love it, but about 36 hours later, they're saying 'The screen's gonna have to go. Give me my 15-inch screen back.'"

But maybe this is what we need. “Let’s look at all the big problems in the world, whether its healthcare or green technology,” Dell mused. “They’re all basically computational problems.” Dell is acquiring Perot Systems and plans to drive down costs for hospital IT management and improve electronic medical records.

He also trumpeted Dell’s Latitude 2100, a thin-client notebook system for schools. "Sales have been many times what we thought. Schools just love 'em. It fits their applications perfectly.”

The Valley may not feel an Apple-esque catharsis when listening to Dell, but technology’s ambassador to the average Joe has his own role to play, and it may be more important at the moment than dreaming up the next Twitter.