Longtime viewers already know the long and sordid tale of Michael Dell's nosedive into Steve-obsessed madness, what with his laundry list of copycat moves that eventually crossed the line from shameless Apple product and feature duplication straight into self-destructive and dangerous behavior. Overall, we feel that Mike should inspire pity, not ire (unless you somehow find yourself within fifty feet of him, in which case he should inspire fear for your own safety and a sudden and hasty retreat). Occasionally, though, his sickness makes him go too far... and then it's time for pity to be replaced with a firm corrective hand. Perhaps one that's clutching a stout length of rubber hose, for instance.

See, this time he's spiralled so deep into psychosis, poor ol' Mike occasionally thinks he is Steve Jobs. Don't believe us? Look no further than his recent interview in MIT's Technology Review, as pointed out by faithful viewer Ray; there he is, spouting off about Dell's paltry R&D expenditures (why would Dell pay for hardware R&D when Apple does it all for them?) and the company's dubious distinction at having shipped the "first 486 machine" on the market, when suddenly, bam! There he is in full Steve mode. You can tell, because just after the personality change, he states with all seriousness and without a hint of shame, "we were the first to integrate wireless into notebooks, with integrated antennas."

Now, Mike certainly couldn't have been talking about Dell when he uttered that statement, because his company didn't even announce a notebook with integrated antennas for wireless networking until June of last year, and those systems weren't slated to ship until this past December. Anyone with a smidge of Apple product history in the ol' attic, however, knows that Apple introduced the original iBook way back in July of 1999, something like a year and a half before Dell got its equivalent wireless solution out the door. We can only conclude, therefore, that when Mike boasted to Tech Review about having been the first to build wireless into laptop computers, he was actually speaking as Steve-- or, rather, "Steve." Spooky, huh?

After that one little slip into Steveland, Mike snapped back into his own personality (such as it is) and appeared to remain relatively under control for the remainder of the interview. But it's obvious that the man can only keep the floodgates closed for so long, and these little "lapses" are going to get more and more frequent until Mike's personality is wholly eclipsed by that of "Steve." When the blue button-down shirt gets replaced with a black turtleneck, we suggest you duck and cover, because the man's going to blow...