I was looking at Neil Wilson’s Sun T2000 vs Dell 6850: LDAP AuthRate, a straightforward Dell-vs.-Niagara LDAP benchmark write-up, and two unrelated but interesting things came to mind. First, this piece suffers from major IP dandruff; is it really necessary for the text identifying the CPUs to read “Intel® Xeon® EM64T” and “UltraSPARC® T1 with CoolThreads™ technology”? I know about defending your trademarks and so on, but this is imposing visual pain on readers, and that can’t be a good thing. Second point: here we have yet another example of one of our people beating up Dell. In my time here, I haven’t noticed an organized Dell-dissing campaign, but I have noticed pervasive organic loathing for this one competitor all over the company, end to end. I mean, we compete with IBM and HP and Microsoft and so on, but there’s a whole different emotional level around Dell. My best guess is that it’s a cultural thing; Dell is doing well in this business without seeming to actually like computers very much. And one of the first things you notice if you work here is that people really care about computers for their own sake; almost everyone would be a tinkerer or hobbyist or spare-time hacker if they couldn’t get paid for what they’re doing. I don’t think either Sun or Dell are going away any time soon, so we can expect the fun to continue.
