Our business is about technology, yes. But it's also about operations and customer relationships.

You don't have to be a genius or a visionary or even a college graduate to be successful. You just need a framework and a dream.

The customer reaction to Dell going private has been a lot more positive than I would have ever imagined. Customers see it as - 'You don't have to be distracted. Now you can totally focus on your business.' So they see it as a positive.

I've been fascinated with technology since I was a boy banging around on my father's adding machine. Back then I'd type in an equation, the device made some cool noises, and out came my answer. I was hooked.

Rural technology is moving from kind of the back office to where everything, every company - sales, marketing, customer acquisition, new product development, media - all industries are becoming technology industries. And it's not information technology: it's business technology.

IT for a long time has been about how do you make old processes more efficient. But with all of the progress in digital technology, there is a kind of digital transformation that is occurring. And you see it with the explosion in the number of devices; you see it in the explosion in the number of applications.

At Dell, we believe the customer is in control, and our job is to take all the technology that's out there and apply it in a useful way to meet the customer's needs.

Real entrepreneurs have what I call the three Ps (and, trust me, none of them stands for 'permission'). Real entrepreneurs have a 'passion' for what they're doing, a 'problem' that needs to be solved, and a 'purpose' that drives them forward.

The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don't design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don't really care, as long as we're selling the one the customer wants.