Ouch! That's almost as bad as the time someone asked Dell what he'd do if he ran Apple, and he said he'd shut it down and return the money to shareholders. Apple is now worth four times as much as Dell's company.

(Photo by AFP/Getty Images)

Competing with Apple on the iPod front seems like a Formula for Fail. My guess is Dell made an honest effort to develop an iPod competitor, then killed the expensive marketing campaign and production run after deciding that they'd built another Zune. Dell has also fallen behind on its downsized-laptop "netbooks", which have neither the power of a full-size notebook nor the portability of an iPhone.

Why bother? The biggest segment of the consumer electronics market is still standard-size notebook computers. Dell has fallen from No. 1 to No. 3 position in sales, but that's still a lot of sales. Instead of diluting the company's resources across smaller, trendier markets, it seems more sensible for Dell to refocus on its core product, the cheap-but-impressive PC. Hey, I'd buy one. (Photo by AP/Manish Swarup)

The WSJ recounts how Dell got from there to here:

Dell's plants are still regarded as efficient at churning out desktop PCs. But within the industry, company-owned factories aren't considered the least expensive way to produce laptops, which have been the main driver of growth lately and are complex and labor-intensive to assemble. Rivals such as Hewlett-Packard Co. years ago shifted to contract manufacturers — H-P builds less than half of its PCs in facilities it owns.

Contract manufacturers can generally produce computers more cheaply because their entire operations are narrowly focused on finding efficiencies in manufacturing, as opposed to large firms like Dell, which must also balance marketing and other considerations.

For many Dell notebooks, a contract manufacturer already partially builds each system in a plant in Asia. The half-built computers are then shipped to one of Dell's own plants where assembly is completed. Because each computer goes to two factories, Dell refers to the system as "two touch."

Selling factories could be a culmination of a plan Dell started last year to increase its reliance on contract manufacturers, something competitors did first. "A lot of companies are already on that model," said Mike Cannon, Dell's production chief, in an interview earlier this year. "We're playing catch-up there."

(Photo by AP/Manish Swarup)

I talk to our board of directors and one of the questions they ask me from time to time is: What happens if you get run over by a truck? It's a good question for a board to ask. I tell them: I'm staying away from trucks and generally living a clean life.

The clip is embedded below.

Let's suppose you had a business you could grow from $30 billion to $60 billion by focusing only on one thing. Then you do that, until you can't do it anymore.

When was the last time Dell did a big, splashy acquisition? Why, the frothy year of 1999, of course, when it acquired ConvergeNet for $340 million. That deal, too, was Dell's largest ever to date, and also for a storage-technology company. And Dell later wrote off $194 million in connection with the purchase.

EqualLogic may have fine technology. That's not the point. The question is whether Dell has any skill at distinguishing itself from its peers on technology, as opposed to price and sales channel. History tells us it doesn't. And now, Michael Dell has placed $1.4 billion of shareholders' money on a bet that history doesn't repeat.

But their bosses? Well, not everyone can be as liberal as Craigslist founder Craig Newmark. Check out these tech execs who donated to the Republican party — including a certain man in black who decided to "Think Different."

• Michael Dell: $754,100 R, $17,800 D. Dell's founder is the Big Kahuna of GOP donors. He threw $250k at the Republican National Committee in '02.
  
• Bill Gates: $70,292 R, $55,266 D. Plays both sides of the aisle (and all over the country), with another hundy thou going to political action committees.
  
• Meg Whitman: $117,101 R, $10,000 D. While eBay founder and progressive philanthropist Pierre Omidyar almost exclusively donates to Democrats, his CEO Whitman does just the opposite.
  
• Larry Ellison: $103,000 R, $123,200 D. Gave $100k each to Progress For America (established to support Bush's 2004 campaign) and Americans for Peace Through Strength (big on defense spending, down on Kerry).
  
• Terry Semel: $267,000 R, $242,818 D. At Warner Brothers, Semel donated almost entirely to Democrats until '91. After a whopping $100k soft-money contribution to the RNC in 2000, he joined Yahoo as CEO and has given mostly to Republicans. Is he just leaning right as he ages, or is there less pressure to look like a Democrat now that he's out of Hollywood?
  
• Steve Ballmer: $61,142 R, $42,450 D. The Microsoft CEO's biggest drop was a $25k contribution to the RNC in '04.
  
• Eric Schmidt: $6500 R, $219,216 D. The Google CEO seeded plenty of Democrats over the past few years, but he tossed cash at a few Republicans including Senator Orrin Hatch and Bush.
  
• Michael Arrington: $1000 R. The TechCrunch blog founder gave to Tom Campbell's Senate campaign in 2000 Since then? Nuffin'.
• Jerry Yang: $ 28,000 R, $123,441 D. This past year, the Yahoo co-founder donated $75k to the Dem Congressional Campaign Committee and $20k to the GOP. In '03 had a $2k gift for President Bush.
  
• Steve Jobs: $1000 R, $254,700 D. Donated to one Republican in 1982: Pete McCloskey, an anti-war Nixon opponent in the Republican presidential primaries. McCloskey later endorsed Kerry against Bush.
  

This is an installation of Diggbait, a daily column by Nick Douglas, who also writes for Eat the Press. He likes robots, cocktails, and mayors who say "Bitch set me up."

Dell's Michael Dell, EMC's Joe Tucci, Oracle's Larry Ellison, AMD's Hector Ruiz and Intel's Paul Otellini, drunk on power and hubris made the most upsetting corporate ad I seen to date. Even the poor Linux penguin is debased in this flick, but Larry jumping out in gold armor is priceless.

Someone in Dell marketing is going to get fired, because if this was meant to be viral I want a vaccine. A shiny nickel if you can sit through the whole thing.

[youTube]

• Beavis: Hey this man's computers catch fire and he's having a "Fireside Chat" in the Technology Pavilion. Butthead: Huh, huh, huh. [Consumerist]
• Valleywag's brother site Defamer is toast. [eBay]
• A new study profiles YouTube users. The words dance, love, music and girl are among the most popular searches. Incidentally, 70% of YouTube's registered users are American and roughly half are under 20 years of age. Add male to that qualification and scratch the love and that sounds about right. [Wall Street Journal]
• TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington gets a slap on the wrist from Apple regarding certain privileged confidential property and points the finger (yeah, that one) at YouTube. He manages to squeeze in a balls-to-the-wall retort at Apple, too. For that Mike, you have our respect. [TechCrunch]
• The CEO of Zoto thinks another photo sharing site, Flickr, sucks hard. Not that he's biased or anything. [The Geek CEO]

— Beth Gottfried

Speaking from China to Wall Street analysts in a conference call after the earnings announcement, Michael S. Dell, the company's founder and chairman, said, "We are not satisfied with our performance, and we will do better."

While the company has told analysts for more than a year that it will do better, it has not been able to follow through.

"Also, Dell has shown poor attitude in class and hands in assignments late. Please call 111-1111 to arrange a parent-teacher conference."

Profit Falls by Half at Dell [NYT]

The head engineer at XPS is more than a bit nervous. "I thought it was a good purchase for Dell," he said. "In fact, I'm excited by it. We compete with each other, still. We're still friendly competitors."

In other words, "I'm gonna go cry at my desk and polish my resumé."

A chat with Michael Dell: Alienware and XPS to stay separate [TG Daily]