AW: Dot-com companies and others have tried online business, but haven't always cut it when it comes to pleasing customers. Your corporate setup seems to have naturally set itself up to evolve to include a Web strategy - is that the difference?
Dell: The primary difference is that companies deciding to go online said, "We'll do what Dell.com did." But what they forgot to realize is that Dell.com is only the front end of a very complicated and intricate business system of nearly 40,000 people, computers, inventory, and logistic systems; and all these proc-esses go on that you don't necessarily see when you click "I want to buy that." What we did was take an already efficient business and make it more efficient by going online.

AW: Is the Internet still young?
Dell: I think it is. I think only 10 percent of the sites that sell things actually enable you to pay for them online. We still have a long, long way to go. A lot of companies have done the basics - they have a Web site and information there. But if you really look at this machine-to-machine interaction, it is pretty uncommon; it only exists among the largest of commercial transactions. There are also efforts to take these capabilities and extend them to really any business. If we can take those capabilities and package them up as standard application protocols and then give them to any user, then we will have the personal computer revolution taken to a whole other level.

AW: Where is Dell going with wireless?
Dell: There are different kinds of wireless. The most popular in computing is something called Wi-Fi 802.11.You have this in Admirals Clubs, in airports, you have it in hotel chains, in coffeehouses, and a lot of companies have put it in. Basically, it is a wireless local area networking standard. In fact, [various companies have systems] to put 802.11 inside a commercial airplane so a passenger traveling from the West Coast to the East Coast would have 802.11. [American will offer satellite Internet access beginning 2002.] The plane itself would have an uplink and downlink to a satellite that would be shared across passengers inside. The idea is, you would have high-speed access at the office, at the airport, the hotel, the house, and everywhere you go.