To some, Michael Dell is the marketing genius who made PCs commodity products and built the number one personal computer maker. To others, he can sometimes be a loose cannon who makes wild statements, such as the one, some years back, that Apple Computer ought to just close up shop and pay off its investors.

Now comes his latest headline grabber, that “If Apple decides to open the Mac OS to others, we would be happy to offer it to our customers.” It was the shot heard round the world, or maybe Dell felt Apple was getting all the good press, and he wanted to bask in the glory. Stranger things have happened, and it was equally strange that Dell dropped this wrecking ball in an email to a columnist from Fortune magazine.

So what’s Dell really thinking? That’s a good question, and maybe it’s not just that he might be jealous of Steve Jobs. But that’s always a possibility, since Jobs gets far more publicity than one might expect from a company that occupies just a tiny portion of its market. Dell must be feeling a little neglected. His company is a major financial success, an unstoppable juggernaut in the PC box industry, but how often do pundits talk about him, or his company’s products, aside from the quarterly financials? When has Dell produced a product so compelling as to dominate the attention of technology pundits? The answer is, of course, never, since Dell isn’t in the business of amazing us. It just wants to sell product, period.

It may surprise some of you to know that Dell has, in the past, actually done business with Apple. For a brief period of time, before it came out with its own failed line of so-called “iPod killers,” Dell actually sold the iPod. Yes, the genuine article, long before HP got into the act, and it happened with little fanfare. One day, visitors to Dell’s online store discovered that the iPod was listed, and then it was gone.

So clearly someone at Dell has talked with Apple, and if Michael Dell says he’d be willing to put Mac OS X on some of his computers, maybe he’s doing more than just putting a public face on private hopes and dreams. You see, among all the PC box makers, Dell is big enough to stand up to Microsoft and not fear the consequences. It already sells Linux and not another warmed over Microsoft OS on some of its servers, and maybe therein lies the clue. I mean, how many sales could Apple possibly lose if it did make a deal with Dell?

If Mac OS X came in a cheap Dell box, the answer is plenty. As I have said on a number of occasions, if Apple dared to agree to such a deal, it would quickly gut its own hardware sales. Sure, some folks would still prefer Apple’s cutting age designs. But Dell would, like Power Computing during the failed era of Mac OS clones a decade ago, cannibalize sales of real Macs big time. Apple would be shooting itself in the foot to go that route.

On the other hand, there is one product category where Apple might gain big time if it did a deal with Dell, and that’s servers. Sure, the Xserve is a great product, but its sales are downright miniscule. From a practical point of view, there’s not a whole lot to lose if the Xserve vanished, but imagine if Mac OS X Server became the primary operating system on a Dell server? Combine such a product with Dell’s marketing muscle, and you’d see an incredible amount of market penetration in businesses that have previously shunned Apple. Of course, the Xserve could stay in the product line, simply to give companies a second source of supply if that’s what’s required to get the deal.

Such a deal could even be extended to HP, another big player in the server market.

The results? Well, it would give newfound Apple Computer credibility. Could it possibly hurt Dell? In the scheme of things, Dell will still sell millions of cheap boxes, because the Mac will still be perceived as a premium product, one that will bust the budgets of tight-fisted corporate bean counters. But having Mac OS X appear on more and more servers will not just enhance Apple’s bottom line, but strike another shot at the bow of Microsoft.

Until recently, we thought of Intel as the great enemy, part of the infamous Wintel alliance. Now Intel is our friend, and maybe, some day, Dell will be our friend too. Imagine Steve Jobs and Michael Dell embracing at a future Macworld Expo. Stranger things have happened, and maybe Dell is indeed crazy like a fox.

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Wouldn’t you know it? The dudes who kept demanding that Apple clone the Mac OS over the years have come out of the closet again to spread their nonsense. You would think they learned their lesson when Apple’s first and only attempt to license other companies to build Macs a decade ago ended in abject failure. When Steve Jobs killed the program, he saved the company, which was on the verge of going down in flames.

Of course, when the news came of the Apple/Intel deal, you didn’t have to be a mind reader to hear sounds of vindication. All right, Apple says that Mac OS X will continue to run only on Macs, that you won’t, or shouldn’t, be able to run the system on a vanilla PC box. Wink, wink, nod, nod, of course it’ll happen anyway, they say. Once Apple joins the Intel Inside crowd, it’ll be a piece of cake for some hacker to come along and find a way to reverse engineer whatever hardware protection is used. In short order, the genie will be out of the bottle. How could it be otherwise?

Now I wouldn’t presume to speculate on the techniques Apple and Intel will use to prevent clones. It’ll certainly be a whole lot more sophisticated than that used in the 1980s when IBM lost the battle to keep other companies from entering the PC clone game. It doesn’t matter. It’ll be difficult, if not impossible, and Apple’s legal eagles will clamp down hard on anyone foolish enough to attempt to defeat the hardware blocks.

At the same time, a few pundits feel that Apple is missing the boat not letting you run Mac OS X on a Dell, an HP, or the box you built in your living room from the raw ingredients you bought at the local PC club. Why shouldn’t Apple, now in the belly of the beast, hit Microsoft four square and try to take over the PC market, just as it’s taken over the digital music player market? Wouldn’t it be great to see Mac OS X on 90% of the personal computers on the planet? It would be just wonderful, right? It would be a dream come true. But do you think Apple will survive long enough for it to happen?

Just take a look at Apple’s financials and consider the impact to the company if it gutted its hardware division. And that’s precisely what would happen if you could run Mac OS X on any old PC. Sure some folks would still buy a real Mac, because of its superior looks. But consider the lessons of history: When Mac OS cloners put Apple designed hardware inside cheap PC boxes, people began to stop buying Macs. What makes anyone think it wouldn’t happen again if Apple took another stab at cloning?

And I might as well repeat myself: Once you open up the Mac OS to a nearly uncountable variety of hardware, all hopes of true plug and play go right out the window. There is no way Apple could possibly test its system software against even a fraction of those PC boxes, and even if it tried, it would only slow down development of new versions of Mac OS X considerably. One of the reasons Microsoft can’t spin on a dime with system upgrades, despite its huge cash hoard and programming staff, is the result of the near-impossibility of making Windows compatible with all that hardware in a timely fashion. Or at all.

I suppose if you want Apple to go belly up, big time, that is a great way for it to happen. Do these pundits really believe Apple wouldn’t take such a potentially suicidal step? Sure, Apple might very well want to hit the mass market big time, but it would be probably be done in the same fashion as the iPod, with full control over the software and the hardware. That’s Apple’s DNA; it’s Steve Jobs’ DNA.

Now it may well be that there might be reasons for Apple to establish a carefully controlled cloning program, perhaps licensing one or two select companies, such as HP, to build and/or market Mac OS computers. If it happens, it would be done strictly to allow Apple to build market share in areas where it has no presence now, and that certainly wouldn’t be the consumer or graphics markets. But I really believe it’ll be done in the same fashion as HP handles the iPod now. The product will be the same. Only the packaging and, perhaps, product name will change. So maybe there will be an Apple PowerBook by HP or something similar, but I don’t see it expanding beyond that in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the situation could change a few years from now, and maybe Apple will devise a workable strategy to open the cloning floodgates. Right now, however, I think anyone suggesting such a thing with a straight face is trying to, like it or not, destroy Apple Computer.

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