As we look at 2014, Dell is now the only major OEM that is a privately owned company._ Dell was a publically traded company for 25 years, its IPO was in 1988, a mere two years after Microsoft’s own IPO.__ The $24.4 billion buyout orchestrated by Michael Dell is the largest leveraged buyout backed by private equity since the 2007 financial crisis. It is also the largest technology buyout ever._ Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners put together most of the money with_the addition of a $2 billion loan from Microsoft. The “new” private company has released an ad emphasizing its own startup roots: The ad also featured a number of companies that are important customers of Dell’s or Dell Ventures invested in including Amerijet, Gilt.com, The Knot, Overstock.com, Salesforce.com, Shazam, Shutterfly, TripAdvisor, and Zoosk._ It is quite common for large corporations to invest in small start-up and we have seen Microsoft, Google, Apple and others do this frequently. I’m generally quite critical of the OEMs but in a few...

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