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Dell Protests 'Not Wintel's Lapdog'
An anonymous reader writes "C|Net is reporting on a protestation by Dell's CTO, Kevin Kettler, who says quite loudly that they are not Microsoft and Intel's puppet." From the article: "Essentially, Kettler argued, Dell was responsible for selecting, if not necessarily developing, many of the technologies in today's desktop computers and servers. Among standards for which he said Dell deserves credit are 802.11 wireless networking, PCI Express communications technology and 64-bit extensions to Intel's x86 line of processors."
So, Intel develops PCI express and [the version of] x86-64 [which Dell uses], and is part of the 802.11 development process.
But Dell were the ones who.. um.. repackaged and resold them to consumers! And, y'know, Dell didn't have to do that! Dell could have just decided to stop making computers altogether and instead just sold ice cream. So Dell really deserves the credit here. Intel creates, Dell... "selects".
So in other words, sure, Dell isn't Intel's lapdog. They're just Intel's marketing wing.
Hey, didn't Apple get some or all of those technologies (802.11, PCI express) in shipping products before Dell did? Just curious, my memory sucks...
Dell doesn't really need to be defensive. They do one thing, and they do it really well: Dell builds cheap computers. There's a lot of value there, the quality of their product and support notwithstanding.
Sure, they don't really do R&D. But they don't need to - they have Intel, Microsoft, Lexmark, and the rest of the OEM partners to do that. They are a gateway to the market, not a market-maker. That's their niche. It's a really big one, and they do it really well. After all, they do make billions a year. And unlike Microsoft, they do it without being a monopoly.
Isn't this like Pinocchio claiming that he isn't Geppetto's puppet?
:-)
Not at the end of the story. Pinocchio ended up being a real boy.
I don't see much of a future for dell ever becoming a real boy.
I'm sorry. The number you have reached is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
Isn't this like Pinocchio claiming that he isn't Geppetto's puppet?
I want a new computer.
On www.dell.ca, I selected a Dimension 3100 - it's all that I need in a general purpose PC. I clicked on the "Customize it!" button. And it seems that I can't get it without Windows. (Not sure if that link will work, it set a few cookies in Firefox.) Furthermore, I have serious issues with any technology company sufficiently ignorant to run IIS.
Though I've always liked Dell hardware, Pinocchio gets no sale from me.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
No their argument is that by choosing which technologies to include support for, even when the market was not already demanding them, they have made them successful. Apple, for example, may do some R&D and provide technologies standard on its laptops, but since they're usually proprietary, and so little of the market is Apple, they often are of limited success. PC makers often duplicate the useful ones in an open way. Dell would argue it chooses which of the knockoffs to succeed.
It's a lame argument, but to a suit, it makes sense. Choosing which finish product to propogate is not quite as helpful as funding and partipating in the development, but to a suit those are just "expenses".
I bet Microsoft and Intel's lawyers were worried about their companies being charged as monopolies again. So they told Dell to say this.
Hobby Robotics
I worked on Airport while at Apple and I can confirm that we did indeed work with Lucent but we did not simply rebrand their tech. Lots of effort from many Apple Engineers went into that product. I personally spent a month at their HQ in Holland working on the freaking thing.
Unfortunately, unlike other Apple efforts, this one gets little to no recognition today. (Parent's parent post excluded of course).
He specifically said Intel 64-bit x86 extensions, and that's absolutely true. Intel had 64-bit x86 extensions in the works for a long time, even longer than AMD, but did not want to release them. Why? One word: Itanium. Intel was fully aware that the main differentiating feature of Itanium versus Xeon was that Itanium was 64-bit, and that adding 64-bit extensions to Xeon with the commensurate promise of full compatability and performance for their 32-bit apps would kill off the already anemic Itanium sales.
When AMD released their 64-bit parts, Intel didn't respond and let AMD take the technology leadership position in the x86 market, in the name of preserving Itanium. Opteron started doing very well in the server market, though, and Dell's server division was getting knocked around. Their customers wanted 64-bit, and they vastly preferred an x86 chip to do it. "Why can't we have a 64-bit x86 chip?" they were saying, either directly to Dell or indirectly by buying Opteron-based servers. Thus the pressure Dell put on Intel to come out with x86-64, which they surely knew Intel was holding in their back pocket. I imagine an ultimatum to release a 64-bit Xeon or Dell would start selling Opterons is what did it.
People understimate the pressure Dell can apply to Intel. Sure, Dell really needs Intel and definitely benefits from preferential pricing, and thus wants to make Intel happy. On the other hand, Intel needs the world's largest OEM to be pure-Intel, creating a marketshare buffer zone (and commensurate dependable income) to help in their battle with AMD, and thus must keep Dell happy too. A Dell defection would be very bad for Intel, and issues like 64-bit x86 could have forced Dell's hand.
The enemies of Democracy are
ok, here is the direct quote in context. Tell me where he is misquoted.
"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system"
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
You might be on to something.
Why would Dell making noise about this now?
You'd think their competitor had just announced something that Dell suddenly perceived as a threat...
I like how Dell's resistance to change isn't noted. They didn't exactly embrace USB or IEEE-1394 (FireWire). They took their time offering DVI connectors on desktops. They weren't even at the forefront of SATA either. So we should give them credit for these three "contributions"?
Apple was one of the more active members of the WI-FI consortium. I'm almost positive that they equipped all of their machines with Airport slots and integrated antennas... long before Dell even offered it as an option (by many months). I think even e-Machines beat Dell to the WI-FI race.
The industry had already agreed on 802.11 long before Intel decided to follow suit (Intel's horrid Home-RF). I'm highly skeptical of Dell claiming that their clout had anything to do with brining Intel to their senses. Not even Intel can take on the whole industry... just look at Itanium.
So they may have helped convince Intel to bring 64-bit to the Pentium like the AMD Opteron, PowerPC, MIPS, SPARC, PA-RISC, Itanium, and Alpha. Who cares? It was a natural evolution that software (on PCs) still can barely take advantage of, barring massive recompilation. Everybody knows that AMD, is the indisputable innovator and influence for x86-64... beating Intel out the door by a large margin.
Dell backed 64-bit extensions to x86, primarily based on price. Itanium was simply out of the price point for their customers. No one should receive credit or be rewarded for running away from Itanium. Especially when your biggest reason is price. There's 1,000,001 reasons not to use Itanium. I'd be more impressed if they actually named one.
Lastly, the article makes it sound as if Dell invented PCI Express in-house. Dell doesn't design chipsets. They only buy them in bulk quantity. It's as if I'd take credit for the rise of Jolt Cola, because I buy it in bulk at Costco. No no no. They tell their fab to solder whatever connectors the chipsets support. It's not like they led the drive for faster interconnects. Again, AMD led the pack with Hypertransport, borrowed from the Alpha team... pushing Intel to raise their FSB speed, to even be able to support PCI-X & PCI-E.
Everything is all lies.
I'm not sure why or how the heck Dell offers no price difference between preinstalled/supported Windows/Linux and uninstalled/unsupported FreeDOS. It's not just a Microsoft thing, though.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Intel had 64-bit datapaths designed into the Willamette core (NetBurst, Pentium4, whatever) since day one. This is mid-late 90s. They were never utilized until market dynamics forced them to fully implement EMT64 into the ISA.
No need to get snippy. I would personally just rather read a story about some company actually making new standards that will make next years computers even better than they are now, rather than some tired article about what OEM is claiming to have driven what standard in the past.
It isn't that I so much object to the *actual* political stories that effect technology, but rather these "geek club politics" kind of stories. They always seem to boil down to some variant of:
Dell is stupid.
Microsoft is evil.
As is Sony.
But Google isn't.
Open source will save the world.
DRM will destroy the world.
Standards are the world.
Apple invented the world.
This season's fashion report on what all the best coders are using.
It seems like a lot of these stories aren't really even news stories at all, but just another excuse to forward one of the above arguments. There is plenty going on in the world that could excite some really interesting discussion that geeks might be interested in aside from these rather well beaten paths. I don't really think there is much of value left to say on any of these subjects, since they all get weekly coverage, if not daily coverage. You might think it is interesting to have the same conversation about different aspects of the same subjects over and over and over again, but I find it pretty boring.