Success Quote by Kevin Rollins

Rollins is doing the corporate equivalent of smiling while keeping one hand on the exit door. The first sentence, "Intel's still our main partner", is reassurance aimed squarely at the incumbent power: calm down, nothing to see here, keep the rebates and roadmaps coming. But it’s immediately followed by a carefully lawyered hedge: "We have not announced anything with AMD and don't have anything planned". Not announced is not the same as not exploring. Don’t have anything planned is not the same as not running tests, negotiating terms, or quietly building leverage.

The real tell is the odd phrasing: "we're constantly being aware". That’s not natural speech; it’s risk management. Awareness is the lowest-commitment verb in the playbook, signaling vigilance without promising action. Then comes the public-interest alibi: "make sure our customers get the best technology". It’s a soft threat wrapped as consumer advocacy. If Intel doesn’t deliver on performance, price, or supply, the moral obligation shifts: Dell (and Rollins) can frame a pivot as service, not betrayal.

Context matters: this is the era when AMD was landing punches with Opteron and Intel’s dominance looked less inevitable. OEMs lived inside Intel’s ecosystem, sometimes uncomfortably so. Rollins is speaking to multiple audiences at once - Intel, investors, enterprise buyers - and telling each what they need to hear. The message under the message: competition is useful, even if you never admit you’re shopping around.