There are plenty of venture-backed companies that could be considered competitive to Dell. Are you investing in competitive companies?

That's something that I had long discussions with Michael [Dell] about, and Joe [Tucci] prior to that. The thing that's great about Michael is that he's one of those few entrepreneurs that started as a college student in his dorm and is now running a roughly $75 billion revenue company, and he's had the skill set to manage across that entire spectrum. Because he's seen this from all angles, these kinds of questions do not become roadblocks. Everybody understands that the world does not run on pre-planned courses, and you have to keep a very open mind. And something that may look competitive today, could be something that's very important to you later. And you have to be willing to take risks and bet on things that may not look entirely aligned, and do it anyway. And learn something from it.

The cloud [is] a perfect example. If you went back, four or five years, the cloud was positioned as something that was bad for companies like Dell EMC, because it took workloads away from on-prem. Well, our view is we need to understand the cloud, we need to have investments. This ability to make hybrid clouds work means you need to have expertise [with] on-prem, which we have tons of, but you also have to have just as much expertise about how the cloud works.