Dell Protests 'Not Wintel's Lapdog' 449
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."
WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Insightful)
If anything apple is responsible for wireless. They had it standard before anyone else did.
This Just In (Score:5, Insightful)
So sad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hah! (Score:5, Insightful)
The ironic part is that Dell has always been very up-front about the fact that they do no research, pioneer no technologies, and create nothing new. Dell is all about execution, not creation: they manufacture devices based upon the technologies of others, deliver them to consumers, and do it with very low overhead.
Which is a perfectly fine thing for them to do. It's not heroic work, but neither is being a plumber, and we still like to have them around.
But I have to admit that my respect for any plumber would go down if he started trying to convince me that he's the one that actually discovered the Bernoulli Principle.
More like Intel is Dell's puppet. (Score:5, Insightful)
Who cares about Dell (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uhhhh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Microsoft may bitch, Intel may bitch," but the customers want Blu-ray, and that's what matters to the PC maker, Kettler said.
At least he had something right, eh?
Risk aversion (Score:5, Insightful)
DDR (Dell) vs RAMBUS (Intel)
Itanium (Intel) vs x64 (Dell)
Sounds to me like Dell always follows Intel, unless Intel's choice is too risky. The last item is an excelent example. Itanium is risky so Dell wanted nothing of that. On the other hand, using non-Intel processors is risky so Dell just waited until Intel brought out 64bit x86 processors.
Dell isn't Intel's puppet. Dell is simply run by cowards and, most of the time, Wintel is the safest choice. Dell will follow wherever Intel leads, unless it's out on a limb.
Dell not a real computer company. (Score:3, Insightful)
They take off the shelf parts and put them into a case. Nothing wrong with that but they really don't make computers they assemble them.
They're NOT claiming to have invented the tech. (Score:4, Insightful)
Ok, it's easy to be cynical about this... (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's have a look at PCI Express. Early in 2004 it had competition from PCI-X - PCI extended - however, Dell here [dell.com] are discussing the implications of swapping from PCI to PCIe. Now, at the time, PCI-X was seen as an interim measure, but Dell skipped it, instead opting to use PCIe across their desktop range. See, they didn't 'invent' it, but a big company like Dell deciding to run with a specific technology is going to have an impact. No doubt we'll probably see the same with ExpressCard, which seems to be standard on pretty much all Dell laptops released since Fall last year - point me in the direction of another manufacturer who's committed to ExpressCard and not still releasing PC card stuff - HP? Lenovo? Fujitsu? Toshiba?
Right, 64-bit extensions. Again, they didn't invent it, but I know that they had an instrumental role in convincing Intel (who needs 64-bit computing?) to add EMT 64 extensions to the Xeon range. That might have been partly forced by Dell's customers asking for 64-bit availability, but you cannot deny that with a big player like Dell dumping out 64-bit Xeons, it did give the market a huge kick up the arse - and one that I'm pretty convinced Intel wouldn't have done on their own. Remember, they stubbornly sat on their hands for ages insisting point blank that 64-bit was not the way to go and that if you wanted it, you had to buy Itaniums (*shudder*).
Wireless? The only evidence I can find that supports this is that Dell were the first company to offer an 802.11b wireless card in a desktop config. I don't for once think that drove any kind of market force as it was an option on the Dimension desktop line, but his points in the article that they stopped Intel marketing that awful HomeRF standard might be justified.
So it's not really 100% bullshit - the guy has some valid points. Yes Dell has helped promote a couple of standards over the years - USB 2 first appeared on Dells, Centrino laptops first appeared as Dells, they were second (behind Apple) to ship LCDs as standard with PCs. However, they've also bombed in other areas: they still don't have a coherent Mediacenter PC and seem to offer the OS on anything you'd want, and they don't have a tablet option. Now if they could pull their finger out and try to push those down people's throats, we might be getting somewhere.
So, before you're moronic enough to read bullshit into what he said, sit back and have a think about how a company's size can dictate whether technologies succeed or not, then think about what didn't succeed but could've, like Itanium, HomeRF and PCI-X...
The power of DELL is simple. (Score:4, Insightful)
Also for popularizing pci-express, if DELL says they are phasing out AGP in favour of pci-express in certain time scale, the gfx-card manufacturers are going to listen very carefully, as the chipset vendors too, since they know that if they don't have product that dell wants to buy the other guys will. And by dell making such decision practicly guarantees a reasonable market to go full production of the new interface.
As far as Blue Ray Disc Vs HD-DVD, if Dell chooces BD, then they will wait until they can get BD in pricepoints that fit the Dell model, and skip the HD-DVD unless the situation becomes such that it's no-brainer to include instead of DVD, and BD would still be too expensive.
But with Dell committed on one side, that side has big edge on PC:s once the prices come down, if there is competition between formats going on anymore, but don't assume dell stays that way if HD-DVD drive costs 20$ while BD costs 300$ . Dell is still volume manufacturer, but BD will be what they prefer if price difference is reasonable, and that whats will be in many peoples machines when the drive isn't too expensive for dell to put as default option in many of their lines.
Re:Did anybody even RTF Article? (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, and just because the dog drags the owner about by the leash a bit doesn't mean he's not still the dog.
One good tug on the choke chain'll bring 'im up short.
KFG
Re:WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Please read before you post. You don't even need to read the article: the submittor ripped off the relevant article text for the summary.
Dell's not taking credit for 64-bit ISA extensions to x86. They're taking credit for forcing Intel to add them to their Pentium and Xeon lines rather than reserve 64 bit goodness for the doomed Itanium line. The point is that, rather than mutely accept the scraps Microsoft and Intel throw their way, Dell has the clout and the will to push Intel around.
Re:Uhhhh.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:www.dell.ca (Score:3, Insightful)
Search for Dell N Series
Chose Home and Small Business machines on dell.ca. It wasn't on either. As a purchaser with many options, I won't go through hoops to buy what you obviously don't want to tell me that you offer. I'll just go elsewhere, with the hope that a company more interested in my sale will also be more interested in providing me with a quality product.
Re:So that means I can order what I need, right? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uhhhh.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it me or... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:802.11b???? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're so 1990s, dude (Score:2, Insightful)
Marx was a genius, wrong in many places but with a searing insight into the limitations of capitalism.
The Mike Adams whom you quote as saying "Marxism is an emotional disorder, not a political philosophy" is a blogging me-too. He seems reasonably intelligent but his incoherent partisan bias prevents him from seeing that Russian Communism is less communism than American Capitalism is capitalism. He's certainly in no position to critique Marxism as an emotional disorder given the quasi-neocon tone of the articles he writes for FrontPage. [frontpagemag.com]
"Free-market" capitalism is a fiction, one that is functionalized by government protectionism and pragmatic socialism. Yes, it's a heck of a lot better than Russian communism, which was nothing but bureaucratic totalitarianism jump-started by genocide. However, to not realize that American-style capitalism could be improved by more judicious application of socialist principles (read Marxism) is short-sighted at best.
It's sort of like the mouth saying "I'm the one chewing all this food so I'm going to keep it all to myself" without understanding the role the rest of the body parts play in the process, including "useless" parts such as the earlobes, armpit hair, and the appendix.
Re:You're so 1990s, dude (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:802.11b???? (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing to remember about USB et al (and what the grandparent was trying to say) is not that Apple created it, or was the first to implement or so on, but that they were the major driving force behind its adoption.
I can't really see the connection with gigabit ethernet and 802.11g -- Apple was among the first (possibly the first, I'm not really sure) to implement these features as standard, but these technologies weren't being given short shrift by others in any way. In that case, perhaps Apple can claim to be the first (or near-first) company to standardise on these new technologies across their entire range, but that's not really a big deal when everyone else was already doing the same.
USB however, I remember. I remember it because it was in 1998/1999 when I was starting out in computer programming. Printers were still almost all using parallel ports. The PalmPilot was using 9-pin serial. Mice were using either 9-pin serial or PS/2. A lot of keyboards were still using the old 'keyboard port' (was this called PS/1? I never heard it described as anything other than the 'keyboard port'). I honestly don't remember what external CD drives were using, although I can remember that my first Zip drive used a parallel port, and I'm pretty darned sure I bought that in 1999.
When the iMac came out, it standardized on USB. Everything was using USB. No ADB ports, no serial, no parallel, no SCSI. Not even FireWire. Just the USB ports. They had a hub in the keyboard, and they were making monitors that contained hubs too (although those might have arrived later in 1999, I'm not sure). It was USB or nothing.
At the time, lots of folks were predicting that this would fail because -- and this bit is important, so pay attention please -- hardly any peripherals used USB. They were all parallel, serial, or SCSI. Or in the case of mice & keyboards, they used PS/2 or ADB. And yet look what happened: Lots of fruit-colored peripherals appeared, all using USB. The iMac was cute enough to garner attention, and the device manufacturers wanted part of that market. So they started making USB stuff en masse. By the end of 2000 it was getting hard to buy a printer that had a parallel port, and they all had USB ports. FOlks point out that USB was a wintel thing, and Windows had it since 1996 or 1997. But it wasn't until Apple made it the only option that everything started using it. Not much point doing otherwise, given that their current ports were still supported otherwise -- why make the effort?
As to firewire -- well, I always saw that as analogous to SCSI, as it was designed for bulk transfer of data to and from large storage devices. USB was a peripheral interconnect, for mice, cameras, keyboards, printers, and so on. Geared mostly towards burst transmission in relatively small bursts. They had different uses. But again, as far as I can recall (and I may be wrong) Apple was using USB along with and possibly even before it did FireWire. Certainly the iMacs had USB before they had FireWire.
-Q
(-1, Offtopic; damn, there goes my karma)
Re:Uhhhh.... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's correct. They used to sell systems with Linux installed on them, but they were burned when they got many complaints saying that the distro they chose (Red Hat, at the time, I think) wasn't "the right distro", but nobody would tell them which was "the right" one. So their policy now is not to pick sides and let the user decide, by not installing the OS. The N-series ones have that basic FreeDOS (or something like that!) thing on them, I think.
Dell does help out with Linux driver development and all this, they just don't preinstall Linux, because in their experience, it's not appreciated. They can't support multiple distributions, so they just don't support any, which seems reasonable to me, if not ideal for the spread of Linux.