Dell and Linux: just another fan dance

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 07 March 2007 03:34

Opinion and Analysis

But then one would have thought that the massive demand from likely customers was the best thing to bring a surge of sales back to the company. Remember in school they taught you about supply and demand? That doesn't seem to work these days, it would appear.

Companies are falling over themselves these days to appear as though they have some kind of open attitude to the public. It provides good karma. Yeah, the open source bug has bitten - mainly because it's seen to be good for business - and anything that even remotely resembles the genre and makes for a talking point is fine. So Dell thought it would take a walk along the road of public involvement.

Alas, this is a company which is tied to Microsoft from its toes upwards. It cannot entertain any idea of catering to the needs of a GNU/Linux-hungry audience as that would anger its masters back in Redmond. So what did it offer in that  response which followed its launch of the IdeaStorm site? It did the most foolish thing any company could do - and said it was working with Novell to "certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations."

You have to wonder about the kind of PR folk they have at Dell when you read this - until you realise it is an excellent way of doing nothing about the demand for GNU/Linux boxes.. There are plenty of candidates it could have picked, but Dell picked the one which is in the doghouse as far as the GNU/Linux community is concerned. Sheer brilliance again.

During a fan dance a dancer tricks a customer into thinking she is going to take everything off, only to cover up some of her vital parts. To quote Wikipedia: "The essence of the choreography is suggestion, limiting the parts of the body exposed to the audience while focusing attention on illusions of exposure." Dell is merely doing the same. The company's umbilical cord is firmly secured in Redmond and cutting it is not something Michael Dell is about to do.