Dell acquires MessageOne from Michael's brother Adam Dell

In the oddball acquisition of the day, Dell just swept up email services provider MessageOne in a $155 million cash deal. How odd? Get this, MessageOne was co-founded by Michael Dell's brother Adam who now manages investment funds -- the very funds with partial ownership of MessageOne which Michael and his genetic crew are investors in. As such, Michael, his wife, and kids will receive $12M from the deal, Adam about $970k, and their parents about $450k. For Michael's part, Dell says that he will donate his family's proceeds direct to charity and was excluded from negotiating the acquisition. Still, we can't help but question the merits of such an acquisition when the only comparison that comes readily to mind is Apple's dot Mac service -- a service Apple is rumored to be shifting to Google in order to focus on core business. Don't get us wrong, we get Dell's whole Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business strategy, but do they really expect to compete directly with Google and MicroHoo while staying true to their PC roots?

[Via New York Times]

[Torben @ Feb 13th 2008 7:35AM]

MessageOne has more value in their email redundancy offerings. The hosted failover service for your entire email infrastructure down to BB service. They saved our butt a few times when we lost offices during hurricane season.
Their hosted front-end to DoubleTakes server replication is rather impressive too.
Not sure how .mac compares to this.

[Gremlin @ Feb 13th 2008 9:36AM]

As though Steve Jobs hasn't used Apple and iTunes to net Disney increased profits... At least Michael Dell was good enough to donate his share.

[Nate @ Feb 13th 2008 9:38AM]

Dell just sees what everyone with a brain and a browser sees: SaaS = the future, er, the present.

[Markus @ Feb 13th 2008 10:53AM]

I wonder which one is mom's favourite.

[Nate @ Feb 13th 2008 1:39PM]

That's like asking who is the smarter Manning: Eli or Peyton.

[Sean O @ Feb 13th 2008 12:05PM]

Hart to Hart! LMAO!!

[Jim Davis @ Feb 13th 2008 3:39PM]

One has to wonder what will happen to the MessageOne employees. MessageOne is all Java running on an all Linux/OpenSource platform, (from their website), and thier datacenters probably aren't co-located with Dell's. What will Dell do with several dozen Java Developers in their all Microsoft World? What will happen to the datcenters? Does Dell have ANY other acquisitions like this?

[freakmarket @ Feb 14th 2008 11:46AM]

I wonder if it has anything to do with their recent aquisition of the company that makes the sidekick series of cell phones.

Could be a direct challenge to the blackberry platform from dell.