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I had Dell for four and a half years, and its sales are still phenomenal, but their operating margins started to contract, so I sold it in early 1999. There's nothing wrong with Dell! It's a fine company. It's just the business risk they took.

I admit that the direct model has done a lot for Dell. That's the only thing the company has ever really accomplished.

Dell's a company that has changed the IT landscape in making PCs and servers more affordable. There's enormous opportunities to make IT more accessible to tens of millions of companies, kind of democratizing the ability for companies to gain access to IT.

It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we'd given customers what they said they wanted, we'd have built a computer they'd have been happy with a year after we spoke to them - not something they'd want now.

The founder of Dell found ways of delivering Hewlett Packard's most profitable products for much lower prices but forgot to deliver their quality so within a few years had fallen behind again. Ideas need constant renewal. A great idea will never be perfect and will never work perfectly in all markets and all seasons.

I'm pretty rough on my laptops. I go through about two a year.

I bought a laptop in 1999, and it was quite liberating, because I could make a lot of my own decisions.

It's through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we've always mapped our path at Dell. There's always an opportunity to make a difference.

The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as - 'You don't have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.' So they see it as a positive.

The typical project design time for a large company like IBM - and they keep track of this - is a little over four years.