Dell, Sony Discussed Battery Problem 10 Months Ago

InfoWorldMike writes "Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday. Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies had conversations in October 2005 and again in February 2006. As a result of those conversations, Sony made changes to its manufacturing process to minimize the presence and size of the particles in its batteries. However, the company did not recall batteries that it thought might contain the particles because it wasn't clear that they were dangerous, Clancy said. Dell spokeswoman Anne Camden declined to comment on the conversations with Sony in October and February, but told InfoWorld that Dell was 'confident that the manufacturing process at Sony has been changed to address this issue. Now our focus is erring on the side of caution to ensure no more incidents occur.'"

Comments

Direct Cause

[staticneuron]

Was it that hard to find a direct cause for this? I would have imagined they would create a stress test to replicate these real-life situations in whitch the labtops caught on fire.

Lies, damn lies, and PR

[Zocalo]

That's pure crap. Why else would they have registered the "dellbatteryprogram.com" domain name back on 10th November of last year if they didn't think that a recall was going to be required? You might also notice from the WHOIS information that they are not hosting the domain on their own DNS servers like they do with their other domains. I think it far more likely that they had their discussions with Sony, but decided not to risk a PR disaster by performing a complete recall unless failures made it absolutely necessary to do so.

My company made the decision to dump Dell just before this latest fiasco broke. Between regular failures of wireless modules in the D600 laptops, having to replace the motherboards of every one of GX270 desktops (OK, not really Dell's fault that one, but it's their badge up front for management to see) and totally abysmal support we've had enough. From their recent earning reports, I guess we're not alone in that.

I worked at Dell

[blixco]

for six years, and the one thing you, as a consumer, have to know about Dell (and possibly companies like it) is that there are two forces that drive their decisions: money and litigation. Dell has cut cost to the bone, not just in their supply chain but throughout their enterprise. Every dime is scrutinized, every step planned to the Nth to determine if the cost / benefit hits a sweet spot. The main driver behind product launches is schedule, and not quality. With the right schedule, Dell can be to the market at a price that makes profit.

If there are problems with the equipment, those problems are weighed against the overall cost they contain. If Dell determined that their notebooks blew up, they'd have to weigh the odds, the cost of litigation, and the cost of bad press versus the cost of fixing the problem.

The only bad thing about this way of thinking from a business perspective is that economy overrides lesson learned. Dell has had battery recalls more than a few times in the past, and this latest may cement the idea with people that Dell = exploding batteries. But rather than proactively develop test plans and more rigorous standards for their suppliers, they simply look at the bottom line.

Ultimately this has served them well from a cash perspective, but this past year has seen a lot of their karma catch up with them; their process (which is King at Dell) has run out of wiggle room for cost cutting, and bad press like this (combined with the cost to replace those batteries) may start to chip away at their altar of the almighty dollar.

You'd be amazed, though, how myopic quarter to quarter thinking makes a corporation.