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Michael Dell Returns to CEO Role at Dell
head_dunce writes "It looks like Michael Dell is jumping back into the big chair at Dell because his company is slipping under the direction of Kevin Rollins. I wonder if they should be looking outside the company for new ideas, or if going back to basics is what needs to be done?"
On hearing Michael was returning to Dell, a reporter asked Steve Jobs what he would do if given the opportunity to run Dell.
His reply: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders,"
Joking aside, how things have turned around hey? Although to be fair to Dell, prior to getting his CEO role back, Jobs also said about Apple "If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago.")
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
It looks like Michael Dell is jumping back into the big chair at Dell because his company is slipping under the direction of Kevin Rollins.
Dude, Dell's gettin' a Dell.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
It worked for Apple, didn't it...?
dPod
dPhone
dBook
etc...
Task Mangler
Dude, you are still getting a crappy computer.
they say it is often more relevant then the comment above, all we know is its called the Sig!
The first priority of Michael Dell should be to improve Dell's lousy customer service and in-source it to US again.
If you are selling PC's by mail-orders (sort of), you better have more than good customer service that customers can depend on.
Even a premium corporate customer care at Dell su8ks big time.
Apple's phenomenal customer support is the main reason iPod and iMac's still rock.
If i call Apple and am under warranty, the dude am talking to knows the business and take me step-by-step to solve the problem. (am not even comparing store-based support, since Dell doesn't have many stores to sell from).
If Michael Dell can bring customer support back to what it was long back, then am sure Dell will rock.
Corporates love Dell because of its uniform ugly black boxen.
My bank switched to HP after Dell's customer support was unresponsive for the last time....
And also ditch the Dell DJ Music Player. Seriously.
To plagarise Jobs: "Move on from MP3 players. The battle was won long back by Apple.".
Get back to core business of assembling high-quality PCs and phenomenal customer service.
Is that difficult Mr.Dell?
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
While yes, proprietary hardware is a shrewd business tactic, and it brings in more revenue stream, it is quite contrary to the hardware industry standard. It is one of the sole reasons I stay clear from dell hardware, and I am probably not the only techie to do so because of proprietization of the hardware.
Now, Michael Dell is the "Dell main director" guy. Kevin Rollins was just a temporary alternative. So, Kevin Rollins was the "Dell alt control" guy. Alt+control+del=reboot. So he is gone now. ;)
-- Rastignac was here.
There is little of R&D and added value in Dell products. After all, building a PCs and pre-installing HDD with useless crap is not rocket science. I don't see much oportunities for Dell in the future, unless they invent completely new product-area compatible with internet-world we all live in already. They are basically in the same position as pre-iPod Apple. My take: SELL.
839*929
Ok, ignoring umpteen dozen levels of complexity, I'd like to focus on one particular thing that Dell could do to stop losing customers at an epic rate.
For the love of god, stop loading up PCs with useless bloatware.
I've actually been buying Dells for a couple of yeaes now. My laptop and my last two desktops have both come from them. Since my student days ended and I got a job, I've found myself relatively cash rich but time poor. As a result of this, I've lost the patience I used to have for building my own PCs and ironing out the kinks and have come to appreciate the option of paying a little more to have somebody do it for me, while still being able to pick which components I want. I take it for granted that when I buy a new PC from Dell, it will, out of box, be slow, unstable and full of 30 day trials for software that only a gibbering moron could ever want to use. I therefore backup the drivers folder, format the hard disk and reinstall XP (I find that the amount of crap Dell are bundling is growing so fast that even the decrappifier doesn't cut it any more).
However, this is not the experience that a lot of people are looking for when they buy a new PC and many people don't have a clue how to go about reinstalling an operating system. All they know is that their new Dell PC, which they've probably paid slightly over the going rate for, is slow as hell, to the point of being painful to use. The further from the cutting edge the system you buy, the worse the problem seems to be, as Dell give no thought to performance in deciding which particular crap to inflict - they just pile it all on.
Case in point - my parents bought a new laptop last year, to keep in a villa they own. It's only going to be used for 6-10 weeks each year, for web-browsing and a few basic office-type apps. Therefore, they picked up one of the bargain-basement Inspirons. A few days later, I get a call asking for help with it. This laptop (a Centrino 1.4, if I remember, with 512 RAM) was taking *6 minutes* to start up completely from the moment you hit the power switch. Fortunately, I was able to talk them through reinstalling XP over the phone, at which point the startup time came down to about 90 seconds.
Not everybody is going to have access to somebody who can talk them through this. In most cases, people are just going to make a note never to buy another Dell again. I fail to see how the small premium that Dell gets paid for crippling its systems like this can even vaguely resemble a valid long-term strategy.
its like a long lost love when you were 13yo
Great at that age, but illegal today!
Seriously, amiga was great, and all us amiga geeks should have stoned Prudential to death because its that Ali
guy who killed it.
Maybe microsoft/apple paid millions to kill it. The strong survive, even if the strong are dumb and kill the best.
But 2007, and todays video cards etc... are a trillion times better.
What the amiga guys failed at is not open sourcing the OS back when linux took off, in 1995. People did ask for it.
It was obvious, they just had to pretend they had value.
The true value is in building a market, a WORLD, not the actual world.
The only future amiga has is the embedded world, it can do magic in low ram/cpu speeds which today are 10-100x the speed of 1992 Amigas.
On a past view moment thought.... the amiga hardware was basic, in terms of features and transistors, but it did just enough trickery
to achieve enough magic. It could have been easily copied and enhanced.... i mean seriously is a D2A convert with DMA that hard to make in 1989 ? 2000 gates at most.
Its just that most combos of hardware/software dudes didnt see the benefits.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Kevin Rollin's employment was Dell-eeted.
sorry, had to do that.
It will be worth billions.
If it fails Ill make one called ESC - the cool gaming center
and then F10 - the place for strippers
and then SPACE BAR - the place to get drunk at
and then ALT KEY - the gay night club
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
The problem with Dell is that they have a reputation for the cheapest machines around. Yes, they have the XPS line and Alienware but those are not where the volume is. Most of their traffic is in the cheap end of the scale where they make pretty much no money and people are always trying to game the system to get even cheaper kit. This is not sustainable. They need to up the price on their lowest cost systems and improve the quality as well as reduce the number of options.
Oh, and stop putting stupid blue LEDs in everything, they are tacky and annoying (looking at the horrid XPS 17" laptop on another table that is just a horrible fright).
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
The register has an interesting analysis on what this actually means. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/01/dell_brain _one/
In summary, nothing, as Michael Dell has been actively involved in all decisions anyway, and is at least equally responsible for Dell's downfall.
Interesting post.. but it seems inaccurate to me.
For example, Dell has been using motherboards manufactured under the Intel brand name by Foxconn since as far back as I can remember. They've been using Lite-On optical drives, and various power supplies -- often HiPro. All of these companies are still in business and doing quite well (better than Dell even).
I do think that Dell shot themselves in the foot, however in an entirely different matter. Dell started the PC price wars. The competition followed their aggressive pricing, and now the budget PC market (which Dell had cornered) is littered with companies barely surviving on razor thin margins.
Dell attempted to correct themselves: they purchased Alienware, they have put more focus on their higher end models, but frankly, I don't think they'll ever recover unless they re-brand themselves much as Apple has.
There seem to be a lot of comments against Dell. I contrast this with my experience buying from them. They aim to serve/please and you know the products will "just work" with Linux distros. I compare this with other shops like ASUS which are completely Microsoft dominated (server/laptop/desktop). Will Dell retreat from its so far accepting stance towards Linux in favor of the market dominant OS? I hope not but history might suggest a "sounder" business position.
Well, Michael's key to success is going to be be to distance himself from Microsoft as much as possible. You know how Ballmer is with chairs.
No jokes, please
The Michael is the Dell,
Hi-ho, the derry-o,
The Michael is the Dell.
Just once I wish some large manufacturer somewhere would adopt the stance that HP used to have, back when Hewlett and Packard were running the show. Back before Queen Bitch of the Universe took over:
Uncompromising quality.
Damn near everything they did was done right, and when it wasn't, they went to great lengths to fix it.
Quality costs money, but you know what? I buy for the long term. I'd rather pay 2-3x up front for something that'll last a lifetime. I'll do that even for equipment that might be obsolete in 5 years because at least I'll know that it simply won't fail in those 5 years because it's built right.
Computers are harder to do that way, of course, because of the rapid pace of technological advancement, but a good design could make replacement of those bits easy while allowing you to retain the rest. Things like keyboards, mice, cases, power supplies, etc. can be built solid and built to last a very long time because the technology behind them doesn't really change much. As an example, I'm sure many of us here still make use of old IBM buckling-spring keyboards, the kind that are 15+ years old and work as well now as they did when they were new. That's the kind of quality I'm talking about.
And yet, you basically can't find anyone who builds things that well anymore. It's not "profitable" or some such crap. But I say that's bullshit. HP managed to get away with it until its founders let go of the reins. They had their up times and down times during the reign of their founders, but their customers were loyal because HP could be relied upon to do it right.
Maybe I'm just looking at things through rose colored glasses, but I still have my HP 41CX and 11C calculators as proof that the equipment they built really was built to last. But who builds things that way these days? Nobody I know of. Not even HP.
That's something that I think needs to change. I just wish someone would step up to the plate...
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I think one of the reasons Dell has been slipping (and I believe it has a lot to do with many corporate failures) is that the executives forget what made the company successful in the first place. The company has become so wrapped up in acquisitions, promotions, and partnerships that they forgot all about building computers. They no longer ask themselves "Which components would make this PC powerful and affordable?" Instead they ask "Which components can we build a computer from, using only our partners' components, that will not compete with any of our other divisions, and is consistent with this month's slogan?" It's a lot like Microsoft. At a certain point they got so wrapped up in their ISP (MSN), web sites, content portals, partnerships, search engines, the whole idea of building an actual Operating System was completely beyond them. For all the jokes people made about Windows back with Win 3.1 and Windows 95, all of it would have been forgotten if they had kept their eye on the prize. Instead, they get distracted by every trend, buzzword, and internet start-up that happens by. Dell has the money, reputation, and manpower to build great computers. Unfortunately they lack the all-consuming vision that makes a company succeed to start with.
Quality costs money, but you know what? I buy for the long term. I'd rather pay 2-3x up front for something that'll last a lifetime. I'll do that even for equipment that might be obsolete in 5 years because at least I'll know that it simply won't fail in those 5 years because it's built right.
I understand the sentiment, but I won't pay much more at this point. I turn over laptops every 18-24 months, and *for my needs* it's just not worth putting too much extra in for a better built unit. Others will of course have different needs. There are things that I miss on the cheaper units (built in keyboard light, touchpad and button mouse, decent speakers) but if the unit is $500 I'll live without.
"Samsung, on the other hand, needs to tread lightly - perhaps it can afford to participate at 90/10 for a short time, hoping that Dell will eventually back off and both sides can move towards a profit balance,"
Except Samsung makes the monitors and Dell only buys them and resells. So today Samsung makes $10 and Dell makes $50.
Tomorrow Samsung makes $10 and someone else makes $40.
The day after Samsung makes $10 and someone else makes $20.
Dell adds little value to the product, and that value is easily replaced. Leading to plenty of competition, and driving down the price. Dell only lead the market because they sold direct and so were able to stay a little ahead of the competition.... well at least till the competition does the same thing.
. . . and reinstall Windows.
Everyone knows that fixes ANYTHING that's wrong with a Dell - just ask their customer support team!
What?
ITs not dells hardware and pcs that is the problem. Dells problem is their support and customer service. No offence to people from india. But dells support in india stinks.
Also dell screwed up their sales department for businesses and government. It took a month to get a uqote for one pc.
Dell needs to work on their customer support and sales. Thats what is costing them sales.
Walmart has stores and stock, and to replace those stores and stock would cost tens of billions of $$.
In the example, Samsung makes the monitors and Dell resells them. Since Dell's advantage is selling direct through a website, something that's easily replaceable, over time competitors simply copy Dells direct sales technique and Dell is easily replaced, because it doesn't actually make the monitors it only sells them.
Speaking as someone who imports a product and sells it on the net, I'm acutely aware how delicate the value of my websites name and reputation is. Dell have no solid advantage, there are many competitors that can buy in the same volume and achieve the same discounts as Dell, and many many competitors that can mimic the direct to customer sales channel of Dell. The software too, they're beholden to Microsoft for. So they have little advantage that can't be copied easily.
But do you turn over laptops every 18-24 months because they don't last much longer than that, or for some other reason?
Suppose your laptop were built like and tank (but didn't weigh as much as a tank, of course) and upgradeable so that you could keep up with technology, and each upgrade cost you about $400 (on average), but the initial expense was $2000 instead of $500, with all of that extra money going into the build quality. Would you go for that?
Think hard about that. The extra expense would get you a unit with a really solid keyboard (not the crap keyboards they have today), a rugged chassis, and a touchpad/stick that would never fail. It would also allow you to keep using your software without requiring a reinstall every 12-18 months. You'd be able to upgrade the OS on your schedule. That might be every 12-18 months, but it wouldn't have to be. It'd take you 20 years to break even financially, but during that entire period of time you'd have a machine that was much better built than the one you're using now.
Would that be worth it? In my opinion, it would be, in the long run. But that's how I tend to think about things: long term.
That said, laptops are probably the hardest computing devices to use this strategy on, because of the extra requirements of portability and miniaturization.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
I bought my first Dell product in November and I could see Dell had some real problems. I bought a well reviewed and highly regarded 2007WFP monitor for $400. After buying it I read that Dell is using a "panel lottery" and they swapped out the Philips S-IPS panel for a Samsung S-PVA that is quite inferior. Many people were upset by this because the swap really made it a different monitor since S-IPS and S-PVA have different characteristics and many photographers and graphics pros seek out the S-IPS. Dell's began to hide the panel info and told people complaining in its forums that as far as Dell was concerned "a 2007WFP was a 2007WFP".
I finally sent my monitor back to Dell but arranging that return was nightmare. From one service rep to another they lose track of issues. Mailing labels to be sent never were; emails they were to send me were never sent; credits due were never sent. I have 2 notebook pages of case numbers just for a monitor purchase and return. It's been six weeks and still I have not been sent a credit even though reps I call say it has. I can't get anyone to follow through on the simplest task.
I don't think Dell is a bad company but its obvioulsy a real mess over there.
While yes, proprietary hardware is a shrewd business tactic, and it brings in more revenue stream, it is quite contrary to the hardware industry standard. It is one of the sole reasons I stay clear from dell hardware, and I am probably not the only techie to do so because of proprietization of the hardware.
Yep. I battled with a Dell PE2650 with a PERC 3Di controller which never really worked under Linux 2.6 (it couldn't keep up with the faster I/O without going offline). Trying to retrofit another SCSI controller into it was a lost battle. Dell and others on the support list suggested buying a new Dell with the "well, they don't suck anymore" logic.
I got a machine from ServersDirect with an Intel server mobo, a 3Ware SATA II NCQ controller, and just regular standard wires and connectors connecting everything with a 3-year onsite warranty for less than the Dell. It rocks.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If anything, I think this might be a good thing for Linux on Dell computers. Michael Dell has previously gone on record as saying:
"We love Linux, and we're doing our best to support the Linux community. We see lots of opportunity there. If the Linux desktops could converge at their cores, such a common platform would make it easier to support. Or, if there was a leading or highly preferred version that a majority of users would want, we'd preload it."
Except of course technology changes too fast. Do you really want to to be using a 1987 form factor laptop (with 2007 components) now? Something like: the Spark near the bottom of: http://www.cgu.edu/pages/2608.asp
My laptop upgrades tend to get smaller and smaller, it'd be hard to swap out components and end up with something physically smaller without completely replacing the machine anyway.
1.Don't assume all customers are idiots, especially when they call for support.
2.Hire technical support people that know something about computers. And let them have the power to do real technical support instead of insisting that they follow the checklists.
3.Don't use proprietary hardware. More specifically, all components inside the machines should be standard as much as possible (for example, use standard PSUs with standard pinouts and not proprietary ones with custom DELL pinouts). Would make it easier for DELL to just switch suppliers if they e.g. decided that brand x power supplies sucked and brand y were better. This gives DELL negotiation power over suppliers (whereas if they had a custom PSU, the company that makes them has more leverage since the costs to have another company continue to make the custom PSU are expensive relatively speaking)
4.This also extends to software. Do not use any proprietary drivers. All hardware should use the same drivers as you would use if you bought the hardware in a box from a retail store. All drivers should have separate installers included directly with the machine and/or be available to download from the web site such that it is possible to install a normal non DELL non OEM copy of Windows on the DELL machine and not have hardware that wont work right because the only way to get the drivers is to install the special DELL version of windows.
5.Tone down the crap that is pre-installed. All spyware should be removed completely. All demos and time limited software should have uninstall options and also any limitations in the software (such as anti-virus programs with shorter subscription lengths than retail boxed copies have) should be clearly documented.
That's something that I think needs to change. I just wish someone would step up to the plate...
You're only going to get that from some place that's not run as a public company by a fleet of low-rent MBA's. When you have three hundred nattering nabobs walking around saying "We've got to drive the cost out of this thing" you get what we have today. It's made worse when the items are commoditized. HP used to be run by the engineers, but not any more. You see where that got you.
If you step out of the commodity market you'll find that Apple gets away with charging more for their goods, and their quality is somewhat better (but not like it used to be). But people are looking for my second head when I suggest they drop $2400 on a 24" iMac with a good warranty - they say, "nawww, I'll go buy the Dell for $350". And then they throw it out after a couple frustrating years... and buy another!
In the PC space, I think what you're looking for is a local whitebox vendor who buys his own parts. Expect him to charge twice as much as Dell's blue-plate special for a desktop machine. In the server space, whitebox vendors like ServersDirect have been doing well for me - Intel Server mobo, 3Ware controllers, onsite warranties, etc. So far I've never needed to try their warranty - it's contracted out like all the others'.
You can also raid NewEgg for parts if your need are occasional. Also, consider throwing in the towel and planning on redundant architectures - that has its advantages too.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
to just call dell up and say right off the bat, "look i dont want aol free trial, i dont want musicmatch, Dell E Support, or anything else other than win xp because i will not be using any of it." would they just ignore me and not meet my request?
i dont want all that crap. i am buying from them and therefore i should get the say. i say if someone specifically asked for not to have all that bloat then whats the problem in meeting that?
In Capitalist West Michael Dell promises you get profits.
In Soviet Russia kgb getting a Dell for you!
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You truly get what you pay for. During college I worked on PCs to make some extra $ - hated working on Dells or Gateways... rather annoying boxen. Into corporate america I go, and I get what I considered a small fortune allocated to buy myself a development laptop. Anything I wanted, as long as it was a Dell :) This was just shy of 3 years ago. I bought a smashing d800 - carried it all over the world, in a backpack, throwning it into and out of the car 5 days a week.
The video card smoked on it at 2 yrs - had a tech at my desk at the office 36 hours later putting a new one in.
Nearing the end of warranty, I called support. Again, you get what you pay for, and what had been purchased was the 3 year gold warranty with full accidental damage coverage. After I went through the littany of things that were worn out (not broken, just USED) with the tech on the phone (I was on hold for 30 seconds - the Gold queues are short), he said it was cheaper for Dell to just replace the machine. How nice - a new d820 was shipped a few days later that is faster/bigger in all respects to the previous machine. Fully covered under warranty. How much was this warranty? $300.
I recently bought another Dell - M90 - top of the line mobile workstation, with the warranty that I had on the previous machine. You can't get close to it's specs from any manufacture out there without giving them $2k more than I paid - and the machine is fabulous - with no pre-loaded crapware - they don't do so much of that on an engineering machine.
Long story short - you get what you pay for. Pay $300 for a machine you get a $300 machine. get the cheapest/standard warranty you get 2 hour hold times - what do you expect? As a previous poster mentioned, I don't have the time to build a machine, and build your own laptop is hard... for the money I have a great machine and a stellar warranty that I've seen in action.
I used to hate Dell - now not so much :)
Customer service has been terrible, its seems everytime I put in a trouble ticket it get routed to wrong support area. Example: I put in a service call about 2 bad DIMMs; I was then given an email about how to troubleshoot my hard drive problem. I had to call them up and explain the whole thing over again to them in order to get a dispatch for the memory.
Then there is the bloatware! It's not quite as bad on the corporate desktops, but the Inspirons I ordered were just loaded with trial versions of AOL and Symantec, and god only knows what else. It must have taken 5 minutes to actually boot up to windows.
That's just unacceptable, you pay good money and in many cases to much money for a computer it shouldn't be crippled when you get it.
Let's hope that Dell goes back to the basics, and hopefully finds some redemption.
"Don't be so humble - you are not that great." - Golda Meir
I live in Austin and let me tell you, there are tons of unhappy employees. In recent years, the bureaucratic infighting has really gotten in the way of good business practices, efficiency, and employee satisfaction. If your employees aren't happy, they're certainly not going to provide good customer service, no matter how much you pay them.
$0.02USD,
-l
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I'd have to give them up first. I haven't stopped being involved with the company all the time.
But taking over as CEO?
No. [CEO Kevin Rollins] and I run the company together. I haven't changed that, and I'm not going to change that.
I checked out the Dell Web Site yesterday.
No OS options other than VISTA were available. I did a site search for "Linux" and got a bunch of Linux compatible peripherals, but no systems.
If they want to keep their customers happy, they should at LEAST give customers the option to buy WinXP until VISTA SP1 comes out.
Personally, I refuse to buy VISTA or a VISTA-encumbered machine until the DRM crap is removed, either by MS or by a third party. Even then, I'll probably switch to Linux. It's MY computer, not Microsoft's, and NOT Hollywood's.
Dell is in a tough spot to be in because there's nothing really "special" about their brand. Apple on the other hand, has an incredible brand awareness and unique style which is something customers don't mind paying a premium for. Since the price of a basic starter PC has come down to around $400, Dell doesn't have much that will differentiate it from white-box competitors, at least in the home PC market. And as other commenters have suggested - their customer service sucks. When you get stuck on the phone with someone in Bangalore, it makes you feel like the company is using the cheapest labor possible because it just doesn't care about it's customers.
In the "Gold" server area at least, this problem didn't exist in the Oklahoma City area for awhile after they moved there - and it showed in their performance and the satisfaction of their customers. Doesn't seem to be the case anymore though - their biggest foes and largest brick walls have become their coworkers down in Austin.
After having worked at consumer level computer sales I will go ahead and tell you that any company that attempts to do this will fall flat on their face. People just don't care about quality, all they want is the cheapest thing possible. They don't want to hear about how be CAD is going to suck on a $299 desktop, they just want the $299 computer (financed of course LOL). This is why Walmart is so successful, I've never bought anything there that didn't break or didn't just feel cheap. I do care about quality, but you and I are definitely in the minority here.
I agree with John Gruber, author of Daring Fireball:
My advice: Sell the company's assets and give the money to the shareholders.
[referring to the Michael Dell's own advice to Apple, years ago.]
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
"Don't assume all customers are idiots, especially when they call for support"
Every helpdesk I had the mispleasure of calling is guilty of that.
"Don't use proprietary hardware"
The PSU is my brother's Dimension 4600 desktop (purchased in late 2003) failed and we replaced it with an off-the-shelf 450-watt unit. Works fine.
"Tone down the crap that is pre-installed"
Amen to that. The Dimensions I mentioned above had so much crap preinstalled, it certainly didn't feel like it was powered by a Pentium4. It's easier to format and start with a fresh re-install instead of trying to uninstall all the garbage.
Dell's initial wins were due to the built-to-order model that let them reduce their supply chain and inventory costs.
GateWay and Dell were the first to pitch PCs to the general public this way.
No Bricks and mortar inventory costs helped too.
Once Compaq and Hp joined them in the 'race to the bottom' Dell started to lose that early-mover (and pricing)advantage. Notice that IBM bowed out of the PC market at about this time....PCs and to some extent servers have been pretty much commodotized at this point...
Outsourcing Support was probably the beginning of the shift in focus to the customer experience to the shareholder bottom line which has helped put Dell in their current doldrums.
All things being equal now that the supply chain advantage has been greatly lessened I would expect the balance of strength to lie with Apple and HP and others who still have robust R&D efforts to drive inventive new products while Dell struggles to squeeze the last few % points of efficiency and cost cutting from their model and can only ape the technological advances of others in the marketplace.
-I'm just sayin'
When they looked outside, they got to an Indian call center that doesn't meet the userbase's needs. QED, they need to look inside.
This sig no verb.
They pulled the PowerEdge 1850/2850/2800 models last summer with zero advance notice. Even our sales rep didn't know until I told him.
Some moron decided that the special mounting kit for installing 5.25" devices in the two HH media bays wasn't important enough to make consistently available to customers, and could be made completely unavailable six months after discontinuance of the model even though there are tons of the machines in the field with 2-1/2 years of warrranty and support still to run (and presumably in use and occasionally in need of mounting a new device in a media bay).
The media bay mounting kit is required to make any use of the bays because there are no standard Molex power connectors behind the bays, and the bays require special Dell plastic rails. You can buy a $50 or $100 PC case at the computer store and get all the power connections and rails necessary, but spend about $5,000 on a PowerEdge and not only does the mounting hardware not come with the machine, you can't order and receive it, either. The chassis provides a special 14-pin power connector for the three possible devices in the media bays, requiring a special 3-way power splitter cable to connect ANY device.
The media bay mounting kits were malconfigured to begin with: one set of rails, a 3-way power splitter, screws (either metric or 6-32) and two internal SCSI cables. Want to mount a second device? You'll now have the power splitter but not the rails or screws, and if you are mounting a SCSI device the cable they gave you with the first kit has only one device connector. Ask about a 2-device cable and their eyes glaze over. Order a second mounting kit and you'll get one more set of rails, a power splitter you can't use, and another pair of single-device SCSI cables.
The Dell DDS-4 4mm tape drive, part-numbered for many Dell computers, including models older than the PE 2800, was NEVER available part-numbered for the PE 2800 in all the life of the PE 2800. That means that if you ordered the drive it would not come with PE 2800 mounting hardware. You'd have to order that separately (see above). The last five orders we had for five of the mounting kits were mysteriously cancelled with no explanation.
Now we're finding that the Dell/Seagate DDS-4 4mm drives they have been sending us are pieces of shit. We have more dead and dying ones than working ones.
When they introduced the PE 2900, they simplified the mounting arrangements for the 5.25" media bays. No more plastic rails. Instead, they use a special tall screw, like Compaq used in some of their systems. The tall screw is what is captured in a very narrow slot instead of the former wide plastic rail. But they have delivered tape drives, specifically part-numbered for the PE 2900, with no mounting hardware. And efforts over the last month or so to learn the ordering part numbers for the special, tall metric and 6-32 screws produced a wholly incorrect quote for ordinary screws, then a possibly correct quote only recent days. We won't know whether the screws are the right item until they arrive. We've been working on this for months.
We ordered a DAT72 tape drive specifically part-numbered for the rackmount PE 2950. It arrived with no mounting hardware whatsoever. Fortunately the PE had rails already, but we had to shop the local computer parts stores for a 12" Molex power extender and we had to use a third-party SCSI cable from our odd cables collection.
The Dell Remote Access Card is a stinking piece of shit in our experience. Most of the ones we have don't work at all for console redirection, the most important function for remote install and support. The ones that work can't sync up the VNC-style dual mouse pointers. The console connections are very fragile if made at all. We had one that worked kinda-sorta OK and one that misbehaved a lot. We pulled them and examined them. They had the same Rev A00 level but different parts, and one had a wire mod on the board. It was the one with older chip revs and th
Michael Dell return Dell? This is not surprise at all! after all, he is the first one that come out with the idea and got it expanded worldwide. He must be frustrated when see Kevin slipping down Dell.