By now you've probably read what Michael Dell (of Dell Computer) said when asked what he'd do if he were in charge of Apple: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Ooooooooo, harsh, especially since he said it in front of thousands of IT people. Well, we didn't tell you about it yesterday, because we were hoping for some kind of Apple response, but disappointingly, Steve Jobs et al don't seem to want to engage in a nasty verbal catfight; Apple claims they "really don't have anything to say."

Just what made Michael so catty? Was it Steve's Seybold keynote address, in which he mentioned very prominently that Dell's entire online ordering system was built and run with Apple's WebObjects (formerly of NeXT)? Perhaps Mikey-boy was a tad peeved at the world being told that his online PC business relied heavily on a Steve-Jobs-spawned Apple-owned technology. Or maybe he's just in a bad mood because Microsoft broke his web site.

See, we've heard unsubstantiated rumors that Bill Gates was more than a trifle embarrassed that one of the biggest Wintel manufacturers was using an Apple technology to run its web site. So embarrassed, in fact, that he offered to have Microsoft engineers rewrite the whole ordering system using Microsoft technologies instead-- for free, and with free technical support. Dell agreed, but the only problem is, Microsoft had floundered miserably at its end: The first working build of the WebObjects version took three weeks to create (Dell paid NeXT $75,000 for it), but Microsoft was unable to produce a reasonable replacement after three months of work. (The only thing that makes us doubt this scenario is the "free support" part. When has Microsoft ever done that?)

We've heard that the Microsoft version is done now, and up and running. We've also heard that the MS version is buggy, and only seems to work with Internet Explorer. Imagine that. So we tried configuring a PII system using Netscape 3.0. We selected a U.S. Robotics 33.6 modem for an NT 4.0 system. We got an error that said "This option is compatible only with an NT operating system. Please double-check your operating system selection." And yes, NT 4.0 was still selected as our operating system. It took us all of thirty seconds to break something... Sounds like a Microsoft solution to us...