A few weeks ago, Fake Steve Jobs wrote a lengthy post in response to Charles Cooper at News.com, explaining why Dell Computer will never bounce back the way Apple has over the last ten years.

The other thing people like Coop don’t understand when they do the “Apple rebounded, why can’t Dell?” argument is that Dell and Apple are not the same kind of beast. Dell is a company. Apple is not a company. Apple is an artist’s studio – and I’m the artist. Apple is the palette on which I do my work. Apple c’est moi, as Nabokov once wrote. Or was it Camus? I get them confused.

FSJ points out that Michael Dell profited from efficiencies in distribution and production that have since been erased by the Internet and China, respectively. He’s betting against a revival.

Dell is Gateway. Dell is Kaypro. Dell is Osborne Computer. It’s DEC and DG and Apollo. It’s a flower that bloomed and now must die. It’s roadkill. It’s mulch.

But then today comes the news that global ad giant WPP announced named Digitas Torrence Boone (left) to lead Project DaVinci, a marketing services agency whose first and only client will be Dell Computer.

Dell awarded its global account to WPP in December after a review. During an initial three-year term, Dell is expected to spend an estimated $4.5 billion on marketing worldwide. Since then, WPP has hired more than 500 staffers – roughly half its projected full-time staff – and set up offices in New York, Miami, San Francisco and Austin, Texas, near Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas.

Welcome to the big leagues, Torrence.

The problem is that unless Project DaVinci lives up to its namesake’s legacy and gets involved in designing Dell’s products instead of just hawking them, I wouldn’t expect the dial to move much. But no, they won’t be designing anything:

Boone, 38, will oversee the agency’s mandate to provide highly creative, results-orientated [sic] marketing that engages customers, enhances brand equity and, most importantly, creates value for its clients.

In other words, blah blah marketing boilerplate blah blah, for which WPP will bill Dell roughly $675m over the next three years. Nice work if you can get it.