Sure, it's trivial, but how can we resist? Faithful viewer Scott Dayman pointed us at an InfoWorld article in which Robert X. Cringely notes some interesting distinctions between the apparent reading habits of employees at our own Apple Computer and those over at Dell. Are you familiar with Amazon.com's concept of a "Purchase Circle"? Basically, those folks track the domains where their orders are originating, so assuming that you're buying your widescreen Tango and Cash DVD from work, they can tell that you're shirking your duty at, say, Hormel Foods' marketing department by e-shopping when you're supposed to be coming up with a brilliant campaign to make SPAM seem marginally edible to sentient beings.

Well, here's where things get interesting: whereas the best-selling books from within apple.com includes such appropriate and unsurprising choices as Making iMovies, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, and Mac OS X: The Complete Reference, Dell's list includes such surprising but, upon reflection, even more appropriate choices as Cheap Psychological Tricks: What to Do When Hard Work, Honesty, and Perseverance Fail and Neil Sperry's Complete Guide to Texas Gardening. Dell employees are also apparently snapping up a ton of copies of The Book of SCSI: I/O for the New Millennium-- which, we have to assume, was actually published at the turn of the eleventh century, because from where we're standing, while it can still top FireWire speeds, all that mucking about with daisy chains, seven devices per channel, avoiding ID conflicts, etc. is strictly old school. Then again, technology-wise, so is Dell, so hey.

It's just interesting, that's all-- we're not saying that Amazon's corporate Purchase Circles necessarily hold the secrets to the inner souls of these companies. Then again, faithful viewer Howard Martin also noticed that Gateway's listing currently states that "the latest update for this Purchase Circle did not meet the criteria needed to generate a unique bestseller list." Does that imply that Gateway employees aren't buying any books? The company is run by a cow that can talk, which is a pretty impressive accomplishment for a bovine, but we have no idea whether or not she can read, so maybe Gateway's employee mix is primarily illiterate. It's up to you to decide whether or not Purchase Circles know and reveal all, but if they do, apparently Dell consists of a pack of lying, cheating Luddite gardeners. Why are we not surprised?