Dell’s October 2006 cartoon is “The Road to Global Standardopolis”, a 4:11 animated clip that opened Michael Dell’s keynote at Oracle OpenWorld on October 23, 2006. Lionel Menchaca posted it on the Dell blog at 4:00 PM that day, and the file Dell_Cartoon.wmv survives in the Internet Archive.
The comment thread is a record of what a corporate blog cost and bought in 2006. We played the file, transcribed it and read the archived comments, so what follows is what the archive holds and nothing more.
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DellOne2One is an independent technology publication. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Dell Inc. or Dell Technologies, and Dell, Oracle, EMC and other names are trademarks of their owners. The domain hosted Dell’s official blog from July 2006, and this page draws on Wayback Machine copies of that blog.
Featured image: Michael Dell at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 2010, four years after the cartoon. Photo by Ilan Costica, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, cropped.
What is the Dell cartoon from October 2006?
It is a keynote opener. Menchaca wrote that he would not have Michael’s keynote until the next day, “but to tide you over, Michael kicked things off with this clip.”
The post was filed under Products, Technology, Enterprise, Vlogs, Strategy and Linux. The same day Dell launched its first AMD Opteron servers at the show, the four-way PowerEdge 6950 and the two-way SC1435.
Menchaca’s October 24 post said the keynote discussed the growth of industry standard servers against proprietary ones. The cartoon’s villain, as the next section shows, is the proprietary system.
What does Dell_Cartoon.wmv actually contain?
The Internet Archive holds two captures, from October 6 and November 29, 2007. The later file is 61,666,720 bytes, 640 by 432 pixels and 4:11 long, which matches the duration printed on Dell’s post.
It is a fantasy-quest parody. A narrator describes oppressed customers in “Proprietaryville” and asks whether one company can lead them to a standards-based city, and the road signs read “ROI Lane” and “Scaletown 5 mi”.
Knights with cartoon heads wear costumes labeled Oracle and EMC, and a Linux penguin walks with them. As we heard it, the song name-checks EMC’s Joe Tucci, Oracle’s Larry, Intel and AMD.
Rivals appear as obstacles: a figure holding a sign that reads “count on UNIX for profits”, a character wearing a WebSphere label who gets hit with an on-screen “THWAP” caption, and finally the mainframe. Health bars like a video game sit over the fights.
The last card reads: “No competitors were injured during the filming of this story. Only the results will have an impact on the characters named.”
How did readers react to it?
They split. The October 25, 2006 capture holds 14 comments and one trackback, and the November 2007 index counts 36 comments on the post.
Of the 14 early comments, six criticized the clip or Dell, two asked about Solaris, five defended Dell, one of them calling the clip “a bit lame”, and one may be sarcasm. A reader called it “Very, very juvenile”; another, “one of the single best pieces of marketing that I’ve seen in a long time”.
Two defenders signed as Dell staff. Three readers raised the XPS 700, which Menchaca’s blog had covered since its earliest archived post, and a Solaris shop asked for “a clarifying statement on Dell’s approach to Solaris”.
We found no Dell reply to the Solaris questions in the captured thread. Some readers answered a cartoon built for a keynote room with XPS 700 and Solaris questions it did not address.
What did the Dell blog look like in 2006 and 2007?
The archive supports a precise timeline. The blog’s earliest archived posts are from July 5, 2006, five days before the “first official day” Menchaca names, and “No Bloatware, Please” ran on July 21, 2006, written by Michelle Pearcy.
| Date | What happened | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 5, 2006 | Earliest post in the archived July 2006 index, Mary Joseph’s 7:51 vlog on building an XPS 700. | Direct2Dell, Jul 5, 2006 |
| Jul 11, 2006 | Menchaca writes “Yesterday was the first official day” and that Jeff Jarvis and Steve Rubel had already said what Dell was doing wrong. | Direct2Dell, Jul 11, 2006 |
| Jul 14, 2006 | Comment moderation published: 80 percent posted, 18 percent sent to Dell support, 2 percent rejected. | Direct2Dell, Jul 14, 2006 |
| Jul 19, 2006 | Downs Deering: customers are about 85 percent satisfied if fixed in one or two calls, about 50 percent after more. | Direct2Dell, Jul 19, 2006 |
| Jul 21, 2006 | “No Bloatware, Please” by Michelle Pearcy: Dimension and Inspiron PCs sold since April show fewer than 10 icons, down from 21. | Direct2Dell, Jul 21, 2006 |
| Oct 23, 2006 | “The Road to Global Standardopolis” posted at 4:00 PM, wmv, 4:11. | Direct2Dell, Oct 23, 2006 |
| Dec 6, 2007 | Menchaca backs the new Blog Council and says less than 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies have a blog. The figure is his, not verified. | Direct2Dell, Dec 6, 2007 |
| Mar 23, 2008 | Menchaca, now Chief Blogger, says the effort began about two years earlier when Michael Dell asked the team to find customers needing support. Blogs exist in Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian. | Direct2Dell, Mar 23, 2008 |
| Undated | Wikipedia says these initiatives, including the Direct2Dell blog (July 2006) and IdeaStorm (February 2007), cut negative blog posts from 49 to 22 percent. It gives no measurement window here. | Wikipedia, Dell |
The names shifted. July 2006 posts call it “Dell’s one2one weblog”, while an October 27, 2006 post addresses “Direct2Dell readers”. We found no dated announcement of a rename.
What can you take from it for a company blog?
The thread shows a trade. Menchaca’s team published a marketing clip on a channel that also carried 2006 product complaints, and it left the critical comments up.
| What it bought | What it cost |
|---|---|
| Same-day publication of keynote material, comments within a day including five defenders of Dell, and a record that survives in the Internet Archive after the original media address stopped serving the file. | Six critical comments, XPS 700 complaints on an unrelated post, and Solaris questions with no visible reply in the capture. |
My position: run a clip like this only if you will answer the product questions under it the same week. A blog that publishes humor but not replies teaches readers that comments are decoration.
For the wider picture, read our look at corporate blogs in 2006, the customer advocacy model Dell One2One set and the tech customer service rankings.
Other 2006 to 2008 vlogs are listed in the One2One video archive. The blog also announced Dell’s first tablet, covered in our Dell tablet PC history, and the Ubuntu launch in Dell and Linux history.
What could we not verify?
We could not find who made or voiced the cartoon, since the post names no one. Our description comes from our own playback and a speech-to-text pass, so we quote only on-screen text and the post, and the song wording is approximate.
We did not confirm that the keynote played the clip exactly as posted. We searched YouTube for a re-upload with a matching title and found none, so there is no embed here, and we did not read comments added after the November 2007 index.
Dell’s blog now lives somewhere we did not verify. The Solaris questions may have been answered elsewhere, and the Blog Council statistic is Menchaca’s claim.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Dell cartoon from 2006?
It was “The Road to Global Standardopolis”, a 4:11 animated clip that opened Michael Dell’s October 23, 2006 keynote at Oracle OpenWorld. Dell’s blog posted it that afternoon, filed under Products, Technology, Enterprise, Vlogs, Strategy and Linux, and the post names no creator.
Can you still watch Dell_Cartoon.wmv?
The Internet Archive holds two captures from October 6 and November 29, 2007, a 61.7 MB file at 640 by 432 pixels. We found no matching YouTube upload. The November capture runs 4:11, matching the length printed on Dell’s post.
When did the Dell blog start?
The earliest archived posts are dated July 5, 2006. Lionel Menchaca wrote on July 11 “Yesterday was the first official day”, and Wikipedia says Dell started the blog in July 2006. That puts the official start at July 10, five days after the earliest archived posts.
When was “No Bloatware, Please” posted, and by whom?
Michelle Pearcy, Dell’s worldwide client software manager, posted it on July 21, 2006. It reported that Dimension and Inspiron PCs sold since April showed fewer than 10 icons instead of 21. The post says pre-installed software is now grouped by what you want to do with the PC.