Its CEO dismissed Dell as a mail-order or garage operation, and a direct-sold $795 Dell machine beat a store-only Compaq selling for $1,500. Compaq's failure to understand Dell's model served Dell well.
It cloned the IBM BIOS using a two-engineer clean-room split and sold $111 million in its first year. Microsoft charged it per machine for DOS and urged it to build 386 machines, letting clones leap past IBM.