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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."
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.
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).