Holy smokes. As Dell’s sales slump and stock remains flat, the famously unimaginative company is trying to tap into the Mob for ideas about what new shade of grey to deliver its hardware in next. And what did the Dell IdeaStorm mob say?

“Give us Linux!”

“Give Us OpenOffice.”

And how did Dell respond?

“No. No. And, No.”

John Naughton reports on the story for The Guardian, explaining:

more than 85,000 people took the trouble to register with IdeaStorm in order to tell Mr Dell that they wanted him to ship his computers with Linux pre-installed. Moreover, 55,000 revealed that they would like the free open-source office software suite, OpenOffice, pre-installed on their shiny new Dell machines.

And all Michael Dell could say was that there are too many variants of Linux. Of course that doesn’t explain why the company, who’s biggest contribution to the technology world was an online store that allowed customers to chose computer configurations from a dizzying array of options, doesn’t simply allow customers to buy their PCs with no software at all.

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My buddy Cliff emailed me excited about the following quote he found on the Yahoo Finance message boards:

Sun vs Dell

All you need to know about Dell & Sun was predicted 8 months ago by some blogger in his parent’s basement. The draft ads are cool:

http://spiralbound.net/2005/09/15/sun-talks-some-smack/

How come the big brokerage house analysts can’t figure this stuff out?

Cliff doesn’t really blog from his parent’s basement, but well, he was happy for the link love.

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