Dell buying EMC: Is this the end times, or the road to salvation?

In any case, the enemy is now Amazon

We need Dell to be amongst the last remaining titans

At the end of it all we need this. All of us. With the market enduring major margin loss and the upcoming brutal consolidation wars the end result is going to be small number of enormous, vertically integrated tech titans.

These companies will be shipping IEMs which are essentially a "data centre in a can" that will collapse an entire data centre's infrastructure down into less than one rack of equipment. They'll sell it as one SKU and being fresh from a brutal price war that saw several previously "untouchable" companies die off, they'll be loathe to charge anything other than premium prices.

Dell is private. It isn't beholden to Wall Street. This makes it unpredictable. It also means that it can actually engage in R&D and bring real innovation to what will be a very sore, very conservative market.

Wall Street isn't going to reward risk-taking by whatever tech titans remain. It is going to reward lock-in, subscription revenue, high margins and market share.

The Dell EMC merger is going to be a hard pill to swallow, but Dell will emerge from this much stronger than before and significantly better able to meet the challenges of the future. What's more, it is now our only real hope for any sort of check or balance against a dark decade of punitively high tech prices and inescapable lock-in.

Steady on, Dell ... and good luck. ®