Sometime today Dell launched a new section of their main website called "Della." While Dell makes no overt claims about Della's intended audience, it's clear Della targets women buying computers.

No doubt, within a few hours the hoard of feminist technology bloggers online will produce (or have already produced) a few volumes worth of writing decrying Dell's latest initiative as misogynistic, sexist or both. "Surely," these bloggers will argue, "Women don't need to have a special section of the Dell website with softer corners, pastel corners and helpful tips to buy a computer."

But I disagree. In my experience, most people — women and men — have a hard time wading through page after page of configuration options when they go to buy a computer. So much so they would benefit from a dumbed-down buying experience.

On Dell's website, for instance, people have a choice between 13 different laptop computers and 14 different desktop computers. Even the particularly adept souls who manage to pick one model have even more choices to make once they've whittled those 27 choices down to one. By my count someone who choses to buy a Dell Studio 15 laptop can configure the computer in nearly 3 sextillion different ways, assuming they only either buy one or zero sets of speakers along with their laptop. (A sextillion, by the way, is a one followed by 21 zeros. A stack of 3 sextillion one dollar bills would reach from the surface of the earth to the sun and back about 10 million times.)

For tech savvy people, the degree of customization Dell offers is wonderful. Should I ever decide to defect from the Macintosh camp and buy a Dell laptop, the number of choices Dell offers would draw me to their site. For everyone else, however, such choices are surely confusing. When most people buy a computer they want a product that will edit their photos, or allow them to email their friends. I doubt they care whether their computer's processor can do 2 billion calculations versus 2.4 billion calculations every second.

This is one reason Apple has been so successful of late. Indeed, they offer online shoppers the ability to customize many of their computer's features. But they also offer a fairly limited selection of computers, and they do not try to befuddle consumers with choices. Their online store also makes it easy to skip right past the "Customize Your Mac" step to the shopping cart.

By stressing the fact that every computer they sell ships with iLife and OS X, Apple implies that every computer can do everything most people want to do with a computer: edit photos, browse the Internet and so on. The few choices consumers must make, such as whether to buy the MacBook or the MacBook Pro, can be done without too much of an understanding of technology.

The average buyer could probably answer the questions, "Would I be willing to pay $700 more to do everything faster?" or "Do I care about having a 15-inch screen?" without too much difficulty. On the other hand, John Q. Shopper would not know whether the "Dell Wireless 1397 802.11g Half Mini-Card" or "Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11agn Half Mini-Card" best fit his needs.

Dell has the right idea with Della: make buying a computer less confusing. But in this case, it's the men of the world — or at least the men who refuse to shop for a computer with pink flowers all over the page — who lose.