InfoWorld TechWatch, Playing the press:

Dell likely has little interest in funding or working with others to create a standard blade architecture. All he wanted to do was stir up the pot and stir it up he did. He single-handedly got a slew of reporters on the phone pressing HP, IBM, Sun and others about a standard architecture. Why? Because he wants his competitors to do all the work in standardizing blades so Dell can then undercut them in pricing once the architecture is standardized. You see, in July, Dell all but got out of the blade market, because it was too hard to sell one and they were not cheap enough to build. Oh and as Dell suggested, the demand for them wasn’t there.

This all dawned on me at lunch with the folks from RLX Technologies. Bob Van Steenberg, CTO at RLX, said that when he worked as general manager at Dell (under Dell himself) he was often told not to worry about certain things, but instead wait for the company’s competitors to sort things out and then jump on it. RLX was certainly not knocking Dell, but it was good insight to how deep the Dell philosophies run.

It will be interesting to see what develops in the form of a group to standardize blade architectures. Michael Dell knows best – you can’t have a commodity market before you have standards.