I tend to get many questions about Dell, especially lately in light of all the troubles that they have been facing. I haven’t written about them for many months because it’s a touchy subject. As you all know they acquired Alienware and they continue to expand their XPS line, therefore I view Dell as a competitor in our space.

There are many questions as to how Dell managed to turn around from the darling of Wall Street to being the punch line of many jokes not least of which is the battery scandal which started by a simple picture at the Inquirer. (for what it’s worth, Apple recently recalled a number of Sony batteries as well).

About two years ago I had a serious discussion with my brother about the future direction of Voodoo. We knew our brand was growing at an unreal rate, yet I was facing serious challenges in the area of product development as it related to creating new and fantastic products. He understood our problem better than anyone so it was easy for us to design a strategy together. My problem was that in order to create some serious out of the box innovations on the mobile side I needed to support enough volume so the ODMs in Taiwan would take us seriously and produce what we wanted. His problem was that he didn’t want Voodoo to go downstream in order to scale like our competition, which means we would lower our ASPs, increase our volumes, and potentially harm our customer base and brand.

The long story short is we both stepped away from the operations at Voodoo in order to build strategic relationships with certain companies which we hoped would foster into something much larger.

We spoke with a couple of key ODMs, and at least three of our vendor partners. I started to design conceptual product roadmaps for future products to which I believed could change the industry. In the meantime Ravi and I were flying around from place to place conducting meetings with who we both believed were the right fit for our future strategy.

I went to Europe in mid 2005, and I started some discussions with a few different people on the ultimate strategy for Voodoo. I had planted the seeds to a strategy which could eventually allow us to innovate like no ones business; in the meantime I was polishing up some rough product ideas until they started to pop.

On November 11th out of the blue I received an email from someone claiming to be Michael Dell....

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