Culmus - excellent points
One minor note ... a portion of "earnings" and cash flow during the go-go years was generated by the obnoxiously large options program and via speculative short put sales by the company as it created a temporary "perpetual motion machine". Microsoft and others did it too, but Dell was among the worst (or best, depending on how you view those things). Those things tend to artificially inflate past results and should not be extrapolated out because they are not replicable (and for the most part, have been eliminated).
One good thing for Dell shareholders ... Michael Dell was smart enough to know how to pull back from the excesses, after having gotten extremely lucky that he and Wall Street were able to talk DELL back up to avoid taking an enormous bath on outstanding short puts (they were in the hole on paper by more than $15 billion at one point, and very close to seeing the perpetual motion machine work in reverse and become a black hole building on its own inward destructive mass). He got away with a major raid on shareholder assets, and unlike many, was smart enough to pull back before he got fully exposed. Unlike the incredible intransigence exhibited by Intel, Broadcom and other scamsters, Dell followed along in the wake of Coca Cola and Microsoft and has largely overhauled their insider raids on shareholder assets. Don't get me wrong, they're still large, but they've been scaled back.
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