Michael Dell Hints HP Pain Is His GainMichael Dell Hints HP Pain Is His Gain

Dell has seen increased growth opportunity thanks to the recent uncertainty surrounding HP's executive missteps, its indecision about its PC business, and general customer confusion, Michael Dell said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco Tuesday.

Dell still sees an opportunity for his company in client PCs, saying there will be 400 million of them sold this year, and that the demand for data from mobile devices will continue to drive growth in its data center business.

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Dell has evolved from being a product company to becoming a solutions company and has a healthy portion of company employees working its service business (40 percent, according to Dell). At some point in the company's history, customers stopped being interested in more powerful servers and shiny new boxes. Those customers told Dell that if his company knew something about their businesses, and could help, they were all ears, he said.

That meant making their supply chains work better, enabling better outcomes for patients in hospitals, and helping to create more successful students.

Dell is an enterprise company, the CEO said, even though it has captured (and doesn't plan to abandon) the consumer. Dell also said that while the tablet market is still an iPad world, he thinks that Windows 8 shows great promise.

Finally, Michael Dell said, in response to questions about his heavy use of social media, that it harkens back to his days running bulletin board systems as a teenager. When conference chair John Battelle asked Dell whether it gives his PR and legal team heartache, Dell said: "They figured out there's nothing they can do about that."

See what else Dell had to say to Web 2.0 attendees: