Dell’s direct-to-customer retailing model and its fast-throughput, high asset-turns manufacturing model allowed it to come underneath Compaq, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard as a low-end disruptor in personal computers. Clayton Christensen, the quintessential low-end consumer, wrote his doctoral thesis on a Dell notebook computer purchased in 1991 because it was the cheapest portable computer on the market. Because of Dell’s reputation for marginal quality, students needed special permission from Harvard to use doctoral stipend money to buy a Dell rather than a computer with a more reputable brand.
...more
