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Dell got a nibble from Craigslist, but this one got away
Michael Dell can be a pretty good salesman, but he doesn’t get ‘em all.
Craig Newmark, the guy who put the Craig in Craigslist, met Dell at a meeting recently. In an interview today, Newmark recounted a snippet of their exchange:
Newmark: “By accident, I wound up sitting by Michael Dell. He showed me a notebook that I was considering getting.”
Zehr: “Did he make the sale?”
Newmark: “Almost. As I recall, the thing doesn’t have a TrackPoint on it — the little red touch point in the middle of a keyboard that’s on ThinkPads.”
In Dell’s defense, it would’ve been a pretty tough sale. Newmark spent 17 years at IBM, which popularized the TrackPoint on its ThinkPad PCs.
Comments
By Jeffrey
October 9, 2008 5:34 PM | Link to this
As far as I or anyone else knows, Dell has never made a notebook that could hold a candle to a the ledgendary Thinkpad.
Big Blue Rules!!
By Franco in California
October 10, 2008 7:10 AM | Link to this
Seems like everyone has forgotten that Dell started out as a “clone” maker of mostly IBM PCs. This is why I found it strange a few years ago when Michael Dell was feted at the Smithsonian in Washington for supposed technological significance.
By Jeffrey
October 10, 2008 1:38 PM | Link to this
Dell laptops have become the BIC lighters of the computer industry.