The word on the street at Dell’s Austin, TX headquarters is that there’s a new Linux evangelist working for the company, and his name is Michael Dell. Though the company’s reputation is as a tried and true partner of Microsoft, Corp., Dell is now starting to show the first signs of seriously supporting an operating system that comes from outside of Redmond, WA. And why not? Unlike competitors Sun, Compaq, HP, or IBM, Dell is not burdened by having to support a legacy Unix, and if the company wants to catch up with Compaq in the lucrative Intel server market, Linux may be just the ticket. Michael Dell invited Linux Magazine Publisher Adam Goodman and Executive Editor Robert McMillan for a chat in his Austin offices last May.
Linux Magazine: When did you first hear about Linux?
Michael Dell: I don’t really remember when I first heard about it. I can tell you when we first got serious about it as a company.
We have this thing called “Ask Dudley,” which is an online tool that customers use to get technical questions answered — you can ask it a natural-language technical question like, “How do I get my modem to work?” Or “Why doesn’t this driver work correctly?” Or something like that. Basically it does word association; it takes a word,…
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