The big takeaway for me seems to be that you can no longer just be a PC manufacturer.  You now need to manufacture PC&#x27;s as a loss leader to sell your cloud solutions and your server management solutions and your virtualization solution and.....<p>Oh and the average consumer is about to be able to trade Dell in more ways now that when it was public.<p>Tracking stock, which is what Dell is proposing to use to partially finance this deal, is usually a bad deal for investors as it usually trades a a discount to regular stock and has inferior voting rights,  unless that investor is an HFT who now has one more arbitrage target, the tracking stock vs true VMWare shares, for their algos:)<p>Since Silver Lake is involved and they know how to acquire public companies, I&#x27;m pretty sure they&#x27;ve already secured the votes required from EMC shareholders to force this deal through.<p>So going through the checklist......<p>- Leveraged Private Equity deal, check<p>- merging two companies that don&#x27;t really seems like a reasonable fit, check<p>- spinning part of the merged company out immediate to help finance the deal, check<p>- deal creates a huge company, check<p>This has all the hallmarks of the Compaq&#x2F;HP merger of 14 years ago.<p>if you work at EMC or Dell, I&#x27;d be making sure my LinkedIn contacts are up to date and starting to rebuild my network.  It looks like its going to be job hunting time soon.