This probably won't come as any particular surprise to anyone, but you remember that scene a few days ago about how one research firm has determined that Apple has overtaken Dell in educational sales to reclaim the crown? Well, prepare yourself for a shock: Dell is denying the truth of that claim. (Insert wide-eyed "Gasp!" here.) Actually, in a way, it is a bit of a shock; given Mike Dell's psychotic propensity to copy everything Steve does, we expected a full-fledged press release contradicting Quality Education Data's numbers-- kind of like the one Apple issued back in '99 to refute Dell's announcement of stealing the top spot. Perhaps Mike was too busy preparing his keynote speech for next week to deal with such a relatively minor matter.

In any case, faithful viewer Macindave alerted us to the existence of an osOpinion article in which Dell spokesperson Dean Kline claims that "there must be an error in the way QED gathered its data." He arrived at this conclusion after a careful analysis of QED's statistical methods and practices-- in some alternate universe where they wear shoes on their hands and hamburgers eat people. In our universe, Mr. Klein hadn't even heard of QED's report, but claimed it was wrong anyway: "The results of QED's survey are completely counter to what every other major industry analysis firm that tracks the U.S. education market are [sic] saying."

When musing just how that could be, Klein proposed that maybe QED was "talking to teachers instead of superintendents" to get its numbers. Now, isn't that a telling response? Here's a real, flesh-and-blood Dell spokesperson, the Official Voice of the Company, revealing to the public that he thinks that if teachers-- you know, those people that actually need to use the school's computers to educate our children-- were making purchasing decisions instead of the superintendents, schools would be buying lots more Macs than Dells.

Compare that to what one of the teachers states in a Salon article about software piracy, kindly forwarded to us by faithful viewer Helen Balasny: "We use AppleWorks for word processing but I put Office on their computers because they couldn't read the Microsoft Word attachments they kept getting from the district's central office." In other words, the teachers want Apple technology, but are being force-fed Wintel junk by the bureaucrats. Again, that's not much of a surprise-- but we digress. Odds are, Dell won't concede the race until some of those other "major industry analysis firms" release numbers more in line with QED's data. But that's okay; we've got all the time in the world to watch Mikey squirm.