Rating: 
Summary: Get it & get with it! Ignore the negative reviewers!
Review: The negative reviewers likely found Dell's success too simple, too easy to be this good. Fact is, some of the most successful ideas are the simple ones. Dell's had his problems to be sure but the model of being Direct is as old as the hills only reinvented on a large scale by Michael Dell in modern times. If you can't learn from this book, then you simply can't learn or already know everything! It's a great book, a book I have given as a present several times. Well done Mr D!
Rating: 
Summary: Lacks some depth but Overall A Winner
Review: The story of Michael Dell is fairly interesting and reinforces the direct model which is critical in today's business world. Mr. Dell was a very focused young man and had some defintie ideas regarding what he wanted out of life as a youth. It would have been interesting to elarn more about what motivated him to the success story that he is. He does repeat the Customer is King theory quite a bit. It is worth repeating but maybe with some more substance. None the less, Michael' story is a worthy read without being too long.
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Summary: From One Horse's Mouth
Review: The title is especially appropriate: Dell explains that the original core strategy of Dell Computer (in 1984) remains the same today. That is, direct contact with customers. In fact, direct sales has always been Michael Dell's own strategy, selling stamps (at age 12), selling newspaper subscriptions (at age 16), or selling upgraded PCs and add-on components to fellow students at the University of Texas (at age 18). DIRECT. Eliminate intermediaries. Eliminate waste. According to Dell, his competitive strategies are "speed to market; superior customer services; a fierce commitment to producing consistently high quality, custom-made computer systems that provide the highest performance and the latest relevant technology to our customers; and an early exploitation of the Internet." Obviously, not every start-up company will eventually achieve the success that Dell Computer has. In fact few will. But there is a great deal to be learned from this book which can be of significant value to any organization. School and college students should also read this book. It provides convincing, indeed compelling evidence of what creative thinking in combination with hard work and determination can accomplish. Michael Dell's is among the most interesting success stories in the contemporary business world.
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Summary: Learn to Bid with Giants : Be Direct in Approach - Simply
Review: A new dimension to exsisting things and encashing by simply being Direct in Approach.Extremely good for those who are in Supply Chain Management and wants to design optimum Supply Chain. It makes you turn the disadvantages into your favour and at the same time advantages against the competitors themselves. A birds vision for planners who thinks vendors and customers as external entity and hence to shift the paradigm. How well you can leverage on sharing the information about your planning with Vendors where the planning could be from day to day to expansion in coming yrs in terms of quantity/quality/information/etc etc. Overall it gives you the courage to Bid with just Anybody irrespective of your size.
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Summary: A great read for Economics & Business students.
Review: I will try my best to keep this review brief since I disdain the long ponderous reviews. I can understand where some of the critisisms of the book come from in the sense that Michael Dell could possibly go more in depth in explaining the dynamics of his business and industry. However being the this is his first book that I know of I can understand why he kept it short and simple, to his credit. I bought this book about 4 months ago and know I should not be surprised that it is temporarily out of stock. Dell is pure genious and deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence will Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, et al. If you sit down and get into it this is a very interesting literature for beginning Business students and Economics majors like myself. On a final note, on area that really caught my attention is Chapter 7. Where Michael Dell speaks of his "Know The Net" initiative on page 95. An interesting comment by Mike Dell: "Some might argue that if you give employees access to the World Wide Web, they will spend all thier time surfing the Net. But that's like saying, 'We don't want to teach our people how to read cause they might spend all their time reading." Add this to his remarkable insight of the future of the Internet as a conduit of economic effiency. If not available at Amazon, find a way to get ahold of this Great Book! Peace :)
Rating: 
Summary: GOOD BUT NOT IN DEPTH
Review: There was a lot of repeating of ideas in this book. Just like the school I attend, it could be cut down into about one paragraph. Not very in depth, but good for beginners.
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Summary: The worst book ever written about the Computer Industry?!?
Review: When the author of a work is also the founder of the Company that he is writing about then you expect to receive a glossed over version of events. I have read dozens of books on Computer Companies, I am really interested in how they got started, from Thomas Watson Jr to Ken Olsen and Andy Grove. All of them have given a santised version of events, but they all have admitted that they did receive some luck to help them on their way. Not our Mr Dell, there is nothing that has happened to his company that he didn't plan or anticipate. I read this and I truelly struggled to get anything from it at all, it is a dire piece of work. The story is sanitised to such a degree that the finished work is made to be useless. This is why I am writing this review because I wish to warn people away from wasting precious time reading this sermon. The book has two redeaming features, one is that all the proceeds go to a childrens charity, so save your time and just donate the money and secondly, with the hardback version anyway, the paper looks to be obsorbent.
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Summary: Quality control
Review: In the copy I bought, one of the signatures (pp. 173-204) was bound upside down. Not sure if this makes the book a collector's item, but I sent it to the publisher for a replacement. Normally I would not mention this in a review, since it is obviously not Michael Dell's fault, but a major theme of his book is how Dell maintains quality control, especially from suppliers of subsystems that have the Dell name on them but otherwise do not go through Dell's physical hands. So it is relevant after all.
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Summary: A FANTASTIC BOOK ON BUSINESS ESSENTIALS
Review: Dell is the most efficiently run company in the world. As a stockholder, I understood the amazing numbers Dell put out from inventory turns to revenue growth. However, I did not know how Michael Dell did it until reading this book. A very customer focused company explaining fundamentals to survive from Services to Globalization and centralizing everything around the direct model. Many of Michael Dell's initiatives complements those of other great CEO's such as Jack Welch of GE. Thanks for a great book. -Keven Carpenter (keven7@yahoo.com)
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Summary: A great motivator for young entrepreneurs
Review: A lot of future entrepreneurs that have the fire in their belly and want to give the world a needed product in the best way possible and also read this book will realize that it is not a impossible dream. Michael Dell has proved that beyond, even possibly, his own expectations. His ideas of direct marketing revolutionized the computer industrty and caused a major upheaval in how many businesses today conduct there sales operations. He is an inspiration to young and budding business people. If you have an idea in your head, don't let anyone tell you it can't be done. Live your dream and maybe you can one day write a book on how you did it.
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