it seems like it

It seems like it’s been a long time since we’ve heard anything but a steady drumbeat of bad news about Dell Computer.. Dell watches its stock drop, drop, and drop again, until it is less

It seems like it’s been a long time since we’ve heard anything but a steady drumbeat of bad news about Dell Computer Dell misses the shift to laptops Dell misses smart phones and tablets Dell drops from first to third in global PC sales Dell loses a third of its market share in six years Dell watches its stock drop, drop, and drop again, until it is less than a quarter of what it was in the year 2000 Dell has its lunch eaten by Asian competitors manufacturing lower-cost computers Dell’s worldwide shipments drop 20 percent from 2011 I could go on

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the Michael Dell-led $24.4 billion buyout of his own company this week does not, for the moment, constitute automatic bad news Not yet, anyway There is hope Most of the financial analysts, while not exactly singing hosannas, seem to acknowledge that

Michael, as he is known to his employees, is entering what amounts to a

witness protection program from the cruel, ill-tempered, and short-sighted stock market, and everyone thinks this is a jolly good idea

But 25 years after Dell’s first offering, as stockholders take their miserable

$13.65 a share and the company’s public stock vanishes from the exchanges,

it is worth remembering that the legacy of Dell’s once-rocketing stock price is not only that it made Michael Dell one of the richest men in the country, it also changed the city of Austin, profoundly and forever You could say, in fact, that,

as 65,000 people a year now pour into the fastest growing large metropolitan area in the country, it was Dell’s stock price, as much as anything else, that gave the city the critical cultural and economic mass to make that happen

To understand how this could be, dial back to the year 1984, when a young Michael Dell was assembling computers in his dorm room at UT Austin was for the most part still the sleepy, government and university town it had long been: laid back, low-rent, bohemian, anti-materialistic, and slacker-filled There was virtually no old money in the city, and traditionally there had been very little business As any UT graduate of the era can tell you, the real jobs were all in Houston There was a nascent high-tech industry in Austin, to be sure But nothing remotely like what erupted in the next decade

Enter Dell Computer By the nineties it had become the fastest growing

company in history, far outpacing previous record holders like Microsoft and Walmart The company grew like a virus, doubling every five years, and then, just as everyone said that it could not possibly sustain such growth, from 1997

to 1999 its revenues exploded from $7.8 billion to $18.2 billion

As revenues soared, so did its stock price From the day of its initial public offering in 1988 to its peak in March 2000, Dell’s stock rose a staggering—no,

staggering is not quite the word—apocalyptic 87,000 percent Thousands of

Dell employees got rich At one point Dell’s stock was said to have created 2,700 millionaires, so many that they got a name: Dellionaires Many of them had a lot more than a million dollars In 2006 a former manager at Dell told me that he made $10 million on one stock option bonus alone—the sort of option package that Dell employees routinely received Secretaries became rich; executives became, as my grandfather used to say, richer than goose grease

Dell Computer was not only filling the farm fields of Williamson county, north Travis County, and the rolling hills west of Austin with homes and people—the number of local employees at the company would hit 22,000 and the

company’s local suppliers brought in tens of thousands more—but it was

pumping wealth into the city on a level unseen in its history

This had several interesting effects Austin, formerly a business backwater, now began to draw top talent from Harvard and Stanford business schools and from the Silicon Valley They would go to Dell, where they worked eighteen-hour days in a culture that was brutally demanding, unforgiving, and bottom-line oriented They would become quickly rich before spinning out on their own, typically as either the financiers or principals in high-tech start-ups Dell thus became, indirectly, the reason Austin was the leading spawning ground for new companies (There were others, like Trilogy and Tivoli, but not on the scale of Dell.)

“It was the surge of Dell that caused Austin to emerge as a high-tech

powerhouse,” former Dell executive Scott Eckert told me in a 2006 interview

“IBM, Motorola, and 3M had been here, but it was Dell that created the

visibility in the 1990s.” (Like so many other Dell managers, Eckert left Dell to start his own business.)

Today the city has more than 1,000 technology companies, a direct legacy of Dell and its rising stock Dell was to Austin what Hewlett Packard was to the Silicon Valley and Microsoft was to Seattle

But Dell did more than help populate the hills along Loop 360 with sleek, low-hung, travertine office buildings housing these new tech companies The

people who worked for them had a work ethic and material tastes that were light years removed from the happy slackers of the old days They drove

BMWs, liked expensive meals, and bought large houses with backyard pizza ovens and negative edge pools

They were also unapologetically nouveaux riches in a city that had virtually no

old-line, established philanthropic class They thus stepped into a cultural vacuum which they proceeded, with amazing speed, to fill It was Dell money

—and massive amounts of it, in the hands of people like former CFO Tom

Meredith, former CEO Kevin Rollins, former Vice Chair Mort Topfer, and former Dell marketing exec Ben Bentzin—that was behind the wave of new cultural institutions in Austin These included: The Long Center, Ballet Austin, Austin Lyric Opera, the Blanton Art Museum, Arts Center Stage, Austin Children’s Museum, and the Wildflower Center The most recent evidence of this is the stunning new, blue-clad “Topfer Theater at Zach” just south of the river Mort Topfer, moreover, has given more the $100 million to organizations in central Texas Then there was Michael Dell himself, who accounted for the Dell

Children’s Medical Center, the Dell Jewish Community Center, and the new UT Medical school (a recent $50 million donation) He has also given to the

Blanton, the Long Center, the Children’s Museum, and a long list of other local causes

So the next time you hear bad news about Dell, remember the good old days when there was nothing but high tide, green grass, and the endless upward spiral of profits And consider that, while, Dell’s stock may be going away, the city that it helped shape is not