This morning, I went into a Gome electronics store, a big chain in China, and counted 59 laptops on a bland display table. Seven of them were yours, but it was hard to tell which seven. In a market this competitive, how is Dell going to stand out? It’s a good question. Seven or eight months ago, we weren’t even there. Today, you actually see us in the store. But you’re absolutely right. We have to find ways to stand out more. We’ve got a lot of new products in development that we think are tailored to specific needs here.

The company recently confirmed rumors that it had subnotebooks in the works. Can you talk more about those? We will be getting into this, but I can’t provide any details yet.

Okay, but can you talk about the concept of selling smaller, cheaper, more portable computers? There’s a shift everywhere to mobile computing, so you’ll see an increasing array of products from us that have smaller and smaller screen sizes. These tend to be more of a fashion type of device that you carry with you, more of an accessory.

Fashion? That’s not something Dell’s known for. You’ve also been quoted talking about creating lust for your products and making cool devices. How did you manage that? Did a memo go out? We don’t do memos. We do emails. But we hired a new chief designer from Nike, Ed Boyd, who has great experience in designing cool, consumer-friendly products. He did watches and glasses and bags and integration with some of the music-player companies. We’ve got a whole new generation of stuff coming out that we think is pretty stunning.

How important will Linux be to growth for products like that? My observation is that when you show customers a product and say, “Okay, here’s what the product does,” they don’t care if it’s Linux or this or that, and in many cases they don’t even know. They want to get onto the internet and do things. So it’s sort of inside baseball.

You came back as C.E.O. right around the time of the Vista ­rollout, and so far that’s been a bust for the PC industry. What’s your prognosis for how it will sell in the coming months? This is an oversimplification, but you’ve got three types of customers. Consumers have gone to Vista pretty aggressively. Then you’ve got small and medium businesses; some have gone, some haven’t. Then you’ve got large businesses. They’ve been pretty slow to go to Vista. Of the large guys, probably 30 percent or so will switch this year, and next year another 50 percent.

But that’s nothing like what ­happened in 2001, when ­Microsoft’s XP operating system ­galvanized PC sales. Do you think Vista is having the reverse effect? I don’t think so. Let’s say you work at a big company and you have Windows XP on your desktop. You go home and buy a new machine from Dell. You get a quad-core processor, a 27-inch screen, Vista, Dolby surround sound. And then you go back to the office, where you have this really old thing. After a while, you start to complain. “Six months, I can deal with that, but two or three years? Wait a second. How come we have old stuff at the office?” Also, a lot of new hardware features are coming out—broadband, wireless, fast graphics—and those aren’t supported by XP.

At the same time, Mac sales started taking off a couple of months after Microsoft’s Vista release. You used to be able to shrug off Apple. Can you do that anymore? Well, Apple has about 3.3 percent of the market.

When H.P. recently announced that it would buy E.D.S., which supplies I.T. services, the buzz on some blogs was that Dell missed an opportunity. I got the sense that you made a conscious decision to pass on that deal. We certainly had the opportunity. A lot of people had the opportunity to buy E.D.S.  So there’s no great surprise or mystery there.

You already partner with E.D.S. on a lot of big deals. Now it’s owned by your biggest competitor. Will its sale to H.P. change how you do business? The global services industry is incredibly fragmented. H.P. acquired a roughly 6 or 7 percent share of the I.T. services industry; the other 93 percent is not H.P.  So we’ll have even stronger friendships with all those other guys. E.D.S. has some fine capabilities in legacy I.T., but we’re focused on cloud computing, on software as a service, and we think that’s the new way forward. It’s a Web 2.0 type of services strategy rather than a perpetuation of proprietary things that have been around for a long time.

That approach fits into what’s called leapfrog technology, which could boost Dell both in services and in sales to developing countries. How does it work? There’s a lot of legacy infrastructure. Building systems 10 or 20 years ago, you had to do it a certain way. But if you could do it with a clean sheet of paper today, you wouldn’t actually go do that. You would use industry-standard ingredients—no old Unix or mainframe type of things. And when you jump ahead like that, you end up with a more modern infrastructure here in China than you have back in the developed countries.

Is there some specific goal you want to reach before you’ll be ­satisfied that the turnaround is a success? I don’t tend to be a guy who’s satisfied. There will be people outside the industry who’ll say, okay, when this, this, and this have happened, then it’s a turnaround. I don’t really care. I’m focused on where we’re going next.

Last question: Do you think Dell is a stock to buy right now? In the past five or six months, Dell itself has repurchased about 10 percent of its own shares. So draw your own conclusions.