Dell and the hard sell

What does Michael Dell have to do to get his company’s stock rising again? On Tuesday morning, Dell (DELL) joined the tech buyback crowd, saying it will repurchase $10 billion worth of its stock in coming months. In doing so, the PC maker joined Cisco (CSCO) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) in feeding stacks of greenbacks into the market for the purpose of shoring up the stock price. Yet Dell shares dropped Tuesday, putting the stock below the level it held back in January before Michael Dell came out of retirement to retake the CEO post.

Shareholders like buybacks because they create demand for stocks that wouldn’t necessarily find a lot of willing buyers otherwise. Such is the case with Dell, which generates plenty of cash but shows few signs of any sustainable growth that might appeal to investors. Dell’s comments earlier Tuesday, in service of updating shareholders on strategic priorities, made clear how little the company has to offer right now.

“We are at the dawn of the connected era and Dell has never been better positioned to meet the needs of the billions of people who will join us online in the coming years,” Dell said in the company’s press release. “By establishing clear priorities for growth in consumer, emerging countries, notebooks, small and medium business and the enterprise, we will deliver the products and solutions customers need to simply connect, communicate and collaborate.”

As Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky pointed out last week, the time to buy Dell will be when the doubletalk ends.