Nobody thought the direct business model would work. But work it did, and spectacularly. Until it didn’t. And therein lies the tale.

To the disrupters go the spoils.

A $10,000 investment in Dell at its 1988 initial public offering would have yielded a fortune of ~$6 million at the stock’s peak.

Knowing that an asteroid is going to hit the earth is not really useful if you are not planning to launch missiles to knock it out of the sky. You have to work massively overtime on the belief that innovation or massive change is going to happen.' — Tom Martin, former VP of marketing