Apparently he likes almost all of the products he makes

Michael Dell’s remarks at a recent Churchill Club dinner in Silicon Valley shed an interesting light on the values of his company and the state of the PC industry as a whole.

First,  he dumped on the whole idea of netbooks. “Take a user who’s used to a 15-inch notebook and then give him a 10-inch netbook,” Dell said. “He’ll say ‘Hey, this is so fantastic. It’s so cute. It’s so light. I love it. But about 36 hours later, he’s saying ‘The screen’s gonna have to go. Give me my 15-inch screen back.’” Dell also said that “a fair amount of customers” weren’t too crazy about the low performance.

It won’t exactly cause an earthquake that Michael Dell is dissing the concept of an Insprion Mini 10 at the same time he’s selling them by the truckload. But just imagine the news it would make if Steve Jobs stepped up to the mike and said, “You’ll love how thin a MacBook Air is, but once you spend a few days with it, you’ll start missing that MacBook Pro.” We do hold different companies to different standards.

But Dell wasn’t done yet. Moving on to more manly machines, he said that when you get the latest processor technology, along with Windows 7 and Office 2010, “you will love your PC again. We actually have not been able to say that for a long time.” Of course, over the last three years he’s shown no signs of moral dilemma about taking people’s money in exchange for those hard-to-love Vista computers.

Clearly there’s little danger of Michael Dell ever being confused with Steve Jobs. But Dell’s own words shine a thousand-gigawatt spotlight on the stark differences between the two — as personalities and champions of different business models. Dell lives in an ultra-competitive world that’s all about numbers. Jobs lives in an equally competitive world that’s all about innovation.

The difference between the two can be seen in every product they make. If you listen, you can also hear it in every speech they make.