The Wal-Mart of High Tech?

FC: Some of your competitors call you the Wal-Mart of high-tech -- you're a highly efficient distributor that delivers bland products.

Rollins: They're trying to damn us with faint praise. We think of it as high praise, when you look at Wal-Mart's success. So beat me with that noodle. People delight in saying what they believe are disparaging things about us. That's great, because it gives us something to prove. We want to be the underdog. We constantly want to be chasing. We never want to lose our edge.

FC: You've certainly set yourself some Wal-Mart-sized goals. Dell is well on its way toward surpassing its goal of $60 billion in revenue within the next few years. Is there a sense that you've arrived?

Rollins: We're not satisfied with the company yet and we don't think we've seen our best days. In the PC marketplace, which represents just 60% of our business, we've only got 19% of the global market. And we only have 3-5% of the entire IT industry budget. We're so small, compared to the total of what we could be. To have any thought that we've arrived is nuts. We look at new opportunities, new portions of the industry and share of existing markets, and conclude that what we've achieved is peanuts. If we double the size of the company we'll have 6% of the IT industry -- still nothing. What about 40% of the industry -- what would that look like? Then people say, "We'd have to quadruple." Well, yeah. Let's quadruple.