Mr Dell comes back to Dell.  What’s different this time?

Dell is an interesting business case study. In contrast to Apple, for instance, Dell never worried about designing sexy devices or building a global network of fancy shops. Instead, the firm tried to achieve a flow production holy grail: making mass produced, commodity items that are customised to individual customer specifications. It allowed clients to choose the features they wanted, but kept costs down by selling only online, using standard parts and maintaining an incredibly lean supply chain.

Then the business model ran out of steam. Just as the firm seemed poised to conquer the world, the world changed. Growth switched from corporate markets to consumers and from rich countries to emerging markets, where people are more nervous about shopping online. What is more, as PCs became more powerful, buyers could no longer be persuaded to add extra processing power or a bigger hard drive when they bought them. Profits began to fall, problems began to mount and Mr Dell came back.

Now the company lets customers make suggestions on how Dell can improve its products. A much more momentous step was the decision to start selling in shops again, a strategy aimed at building “brand lust”. Now it will have the tricky job of managing relationships with suppliers. Dell also wants to move into managing its customers’ increasingly complex IT systems. They have also developed some stylish computers that are selling well. Dell recently announced plans to join the PC industry’s latest trend: mini-notebooks with small screens that cost only a few hundred dollars. And its products can now be found on the shelves of more than 10,000 stores, many of them in emerging economies.

Dell is by no means the only company changing strategy to reflect dramatic growth rates in the developing world. Check out Renault-Nissan join the race to produce a $2500 car