Dell, Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) has been known in the last three of four years as a "me too" PC manufacturer. Sure, it was the world's largest PC maker until rival Hewlett-Packard Corp. (NYSE: HPQ) stole that crown in 2006 and hasn't looked back. When Dell founder Michael Dell came back to the CEO spot in January 2007, his resultant changes has given Dell the push it needed. Some changes, though, are just plain head-scratching.

Unlike the gutsy and excellent move back onto the retail shelf, Dell announced last week that it would allow DVD-quality downloads from partner CinemaNow to be downloaded and then burned to a special "Qflix" DVD hardware drive. This new drive will apparently sell for $120 and will be available as an option on most newer Dell laptop models. The question is this: does Dell really see a market need for yet another DVD standard to allow the 10-step process of getting digital content from a partner to a DVD disc for some kind of archival purpose by any of its customers?

The point here is that Dell wants to be the customer's source for downloading actual DVD content (complete with menus, alternate audio and all the other DVD goodies) to your PC. Unless you're extremely patient, I can only imagine the length of time it will take to "download" all this to a Dell PC. Perhaps a workday? The point is that until we have a huge increase in broadband internet speeds in the U.S. for the consumer market and consumers expect functionality like this to be free, something like this will flop except for the early adopter and geek crowd. But hey, that's never stopped a PC maker from exploring odd niche product categories before, right?