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Pre-Installed Linux Tops Dell Customer Requests
dhart writes "Within only a few days of Dell opening a new customer feedback website, they discovered that the feature most requested (by an almost 2-to-1 margin!) is an option on all new Dell PCs: pre-installed Linux. (And the number 3 request is pre-installed Open Office.) I believe they'll have a harder time now with the tired old mantra 'There's no customer demand for Linux.'"
It's not so much that there isn't customer demand for LINUX, it's that there isn't a whole lot of customer demand for individual Linux flavors A, B, C, D, E, F, G, etc. It's too much of a PITA to worry about qualifying all that different hardware with all the different distros and then worrying about dealing with Red Hat, Novell and all the different suppliers of what's basically a free OS.
Now, if they had a service like "I'll send you the Linux distro I want, please preinstall it on the next 500 computers you ship me," that could be big.
You think? I'm not sure anymore. Just a few weeks ago Michael Dell stood up with Vint Cerf and admitted 1 in 4 M$ computers is part of a botnet. Now his company is publicizing customer demand for Linux. If he was interested in toeing the M$ party line, he would have suppressed the results. The odds are Dell is moving away from being a M$ vassal.
2007 is the year of Linux. Vista sucks, is not selling and the revolt is on. It's about time!
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Do you know any Filipinos, and more importantly, do you speak English with them on a regular basis?
I know a teenage Filipina girl. Although she does have a noticable accent, her English is impeccable and easily understood. She's not a special case, this is normal for Filipinos. The Phillippines exhibit a situation of diglossia in which English is used for educational and government as well as other formal purposes. What this means is that everything from government proceedings to television reporting is conducted in the English language. In addition, English is the only language spoken in many schools, and textbooks are exclusively written in the language. According to the Filipina I know, any use of her local language in her school incurs a fine.
Thus, Filipinos, especially educated ones, can be expected to have a good command of English. This, coupled with the fact that their accent is quite easily understandable, would make them, on average and from a linguistic point of view, much better technical support representatives than their Indian counterparts.
Le français vous intéresse?
I won't tell you how to mod the parent, but I can throw my 2 cent's worth of experience in.
It is 100% true that English isn't a second language in the Philippines, it's a primary language. I work in a 24x7 datacenter, and a year or so ago, a new support center was opened in the Philippines to handle our night shift. I thought they were going to let a bunch of people go, but it turned out, they were expanding our operations, not replacing them. (Thank goodness!)
I was very skeptical that this would work. I had many of the same fears. Would we be able to understand their accent? Would they be undertrained an incompetent? Would there be any culture clashes?
The answers, to my surprise, were: They have no discernible accent—none. They're very smart and easily keep up with our local folks, and have often gone far above and beyond the call of duty to help us out. And yes, they are very familiar with our culture and ways of doing things. In fact, a nice bonus about the Filipino support center is that a lot of our night shift calls were coming from Asia-Pacific countries (since, duh, they were open at that time of night), and a lot of those clients feel much more comfortable dealing with our Filipino support center than our American night shift folks.
By now, you're probably thinking, "Right, you're just a management goober," but I assure you, I'm not. In fact, I was certain that I was going to lose my job due to Filipino outsourcing, but that never happened, since we weren't really outsourcing. And after working with them for a while at our shift turnover and seeing the quality of the work they did for us, I can honestly say that hiring our Filipino friends has turned out to be one of the few times management actually did something right at my company, and it's been a win-win situation for everyone.
I'm not saying that every Filipino person is smart and capable and a perfect joy to work with. Just like dealing with all people, your mileage may vary. But I can say that anyone who thinks that good customer service can't be provided by support centers in the Philippines is either stupid or doesn't know enough Filipino people, if any at all.