Among the aftermath of this afternoon's festivities is a lingering pride in Steve Jobs for finally addressing Mike Dell's nasty comments from several weeks ago. You remember, right? When Mike was asked what he'd do if he were the CEO of Apple, he said he'd "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." At the time, we at AtAT were disappointed in Steve's all-too-mature decision to let that comment slide without retribution, but now we're relieved to find that he was only biding his time. In today's presentation, he finally broke his silence-- and all but declared war.

Steve prefaced things by explaining the history behind Dell's online storefront. Several years ago, Dell approached NeXT to have them build their web commerce system, and NeXT did just that-- and it was a huge success, growing from $0 to over $750 million a year in online sales. Steve said that despite the fact that Dell replaced the system a couple of months ago with a "slower" but "politically correct" Microsoft-built system (at Bill Gates' insistence), one would think that after NeXT had helped Dell achieve such greatness, Mike would be grateful to Steve and Apple/NeXT, or at least nice. But instead, Mike said Apple should be shut down, and Steve thought that was "really rude." (He commented that he wasn't sure, so he looked it up, and it was really rude. Laughter ensued.)

So, Steve's angling for payback. The people from NeXT who built Dell's site are now Apple employees, and according to Steve, the Apple Store sets a "new standard for e-commerce" by taking that original technology and going further with it. Steve to Mike: "With our new products, and our new store, and our new build-to-order manufacturing, we're coming after you, buddy." Apple even has a fifteen-second Think Different TV spot slated to appear in January, targeted directly at Dell as their competition. Prepare for battle.