[Tamerlin]

No, they're completely clueless about it. There's no doubt about that.

I attended a mac users' group meeting once in which an Apple rep tried to convince us that their SAN system was better than Dell's because of the price... I looked on with contempt because he was ignoring the thing that you're getting from Dell: support.

Sure enough, when Apple started hyping their big mac installation, they obsessed with their price compared to Dell's... completely ignoring the fact that Dell's price included installation, a 3-year on-site support contract, a building release, and even network setup (hardware).

And then when I worked for a company that made MacBook Pros an option for developers, the IT staff ended up hating them. Their prices were 2x that of the Dell laptops with comparable configurations, and Apple couldn't handle support at all -- when the IT guys contacted support for a recall, the support staff at Apple were lost when our guys had 50 laptops to send back...

Naturally, when I heard that Dell was outsourcing customer service to India, I stopped buying Dell. (They couldn't outsource their corporate support to India... fortunately for them -- I suspect that if they had, they'd have lost a lot of bids to IBM and HP.)