Seeking to expand his company's storage offerings, Michael Dell is buying EqualLogic for $1.4 billion. This is a monumentally bad move. Leave aside the details of what EqualLogic does. (Something to do with tying storage servers together on a network.) Let's remember what Dell does. Dell is a highly skilled repackager of commodity tech, like Intel microprocessors, Seagate hard drives, and the Windows OS. Add a few extra parts, slap some plastic around it, and you've got a PC. Sure, it can make some money installing that PC, too. But what it doesn't do, and shouldn't do, is try to advance the state of the art on its own. His own hard experience should have told Michael Dell not to make this deal.