Expanding Dell's business means getting into services. IBM gets almost equal revenue from services as products. HP Bought EDS for the same reason - to grow their services market share. Dell bought Perot last fall - they need to figure services out - then pump up the volume. Simply buying another hardware products company won't do it. EMC is out there in storage land - and they own Teradata...any bets?

I got my 14 year old game fanatic hooked on Doom on line. Then I downloaded the SDK, and showed him how to modify the attributes of weapons he was familiar with. Came back from a trip three weeks later - to find he was running a node on one of my servers with seriously powerful weapons at the entry level. He ended up with the game developers reaching out to talk to him, about how he'd done what he'd did. Thirteen years later, he has a BSc in Software Engineering, and is doing his PhD. Moral of the story? Get them hooked on what they already like - and use that to develop skills and interests. Note: The Doom SDK is available on-line for Linux. L-Fan