Dell may now be number one in terms of PC sales but its founder has no intention of taking his foot off the accelerator.
The 38-year-old entrepreneur is on crutches and his ankle is in plaster following a riding accident. "The horse slipped,'' winces the Texan on a visit to Europe to meet staff and customers.
But Dell is not just feeling bruised from his fall. He has found himself under fire from a gang of industry heavyweights after he argued that the company's rivals spend too much on research and development.
"You can waste a lot of money reinventing things that others have invented,'' said Dell in the opening address to a conference organised by Oracle, the leading business software group.
Over the next four days his rivals hit back: Sun's Scott McNealy, Dell's arch-rival Carly Fiorina (the chairman and chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard) and Craig Barrett of Intel all had a pop at the man and the company.
Dell has been conspicuously hurt by the brickbats: "We are certainly not shy about pointing out the advantages of what we do compared to our competitors. But when you start pointing at particular people, I think that is a little tough,'' he says.
Not that Dell has too much too worry about. Last month the company, which sells an average 120,000 computers every day, reported that quarterly profits had risen 24 per cent to $621 million, as sales of its desktop PCs, notebook computers and services increased 27 per cent. Its revenues were $9.78 billion.
The computer industry as a whole may be on its knees, but Dell seems to go from strength to strength, increasing its market share and delivering quarter-on-quarter growth for shareholders. But then Dell has always bucked the trends. The company was founded in 1984 on the untested idea of selling computer systems directly to customers.
The theory was simple: by cutting out the cost of a dealer, Dell could sell cheaper. And it seems to have worked. "Dell is the largest seller of small computer systems in the world,'' he crows.
Like many entrepreneurs, Dell displayed his talent for making money at an early age. Bored with collecting stamps, he began selling them by mail order from his bedroom at the age of 13. Soon he was grossing $2,000 a month.
"I did a little stocks and currency trading when I was at high school,'' he says, in a flat tone that suggests he sees nothing unusual about a teenager playing the markets. "Then I got a job selling newspaper subscriptions.''
Even today, the entrepreneurial streak does not stay hidden for long. Thus, on a number of occasions during our interview Dell cannot resist plugging his book, Direct From Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized An Industry.
Anyway, although Dell enrolled at the University of Texas in 1983, he was never to graduate. Within a year, a computer components business founded by Dell in his university dorm was generating $80,000 a month, which was enough to persuade him to drop out.
Then he went into IBM "clones'' and the origins of the Dell empire were put in place.
So what drives a 38-year-old worth so many billions to carry on working as hard as he does? Money, he admits, stopped being the driving force "a long, long time ago''.
These days he can afford the luxury of saying it's about changing the world. "It is fun. It is exciting. It is about helping the company reach its full potential and seeing the impact that the company has on other people's lives.'' Predictably, there are no plans to retire, ever: "I am sure in a couple of hundred years I will be dead. But for now I am doing fine.
"I love what I do. It is not all-consuming. I have a family. I have got four children. I work hard and I play hard also. I think I have good balance in various parts of my life.''
And what about the outlook for his industry? He sees no signs of a massive upturn in the wider market or an end to savage deflation in the sector. That's understandable: much of the price cutting is led by Dell itself, as an integral part of its modus operandi.
But he is quick to dismiss talk of an increasingly saturated market for PCs. "What you have is a replacement market (customers trading in their old computers for new ones) rather than a saturated market,'' says Dell, who adds that "computer envy'' forces employers to buy new machines every couple of years.
Future demand in the home, predicts Dell, will be driven by the increasing use of the PC as an entertainment centre. In Japan, Dell's flat panel LCD screens already double as televisions. And recently Dell announced plans to sell the TVs in the US and open an online music store. "The PC is going to win,'' says Dell, who is confident of seeing off the challenge from the next generation of game consoles.
Dell may now be number one in terms of PC sales but the eponymous founder has no intention of taking his foot off the accelerator. In years to come, he wants his business to be judged on its share of the wider information technology market for data storage, networking and assorted services. "We have just a five per cent market share in a $800 billion business,'' he argues. He wants more, a lot more.
© The Telegraph Group Limited London 2003