Michael Dell Says Windows 7 Will Make You Love PCs

ruphus13 writes "In a recent talk at the Churchill Club, Michael Dell addressed several topics, including the fact that Windows 7 is poised to take advantage of the upgrade cycle. Dell has always been a strong MS OEM ally and it is now hoping to cash in again from the impending upgrades. From the post: 'Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming "refresh cycle" for which he has high hopes. "The latest generation of chips from Intel is strong, particularly Nehalem," he said, adding, "and Windows 7 is on its way." (The operating system arrives Oct. 22nd, although Microsoft's large-volume licensees are already getting it.) He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old. "I've been using Windows 7 for a long time now," he said, "and if you get the latest processor technology and Office 2010 with it, you will love your PC again. It's a dramatic improvement."'"

Comments

Yeah, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a well know fact that Michael Dell uses Ubuntu exclusively at home, and only trots out the pro-Windows stance when paid to by Microsoft, so none of this should be taken seriously. Not that anyone sensible would take anyone saying 'Windows is good!' seriously.

Re:Yeah, right.

[WaywardGeek]

Dell screwed up, big time, and now they're in a deep hole. In the 90's, I was influential in steering 3 companies to being all Dell houses. It was fun. Someone would ask why we should pay more for a Dell, and I could demonstrate what happens when I called support. I'd call Microsoft for a question about Power Point first... it's always fun being ridiculed by a moron, which is all the support Microsoft offers for us peons who only own hundreds of their licenses. Then, I'd call Dell for the same question about Power Point (or whatever Microsoft product was pissing me off that day). Dell support would say, "That's really a question for Microsoft, and we don't technically offer support in cases like this. However, the answer to your question is ..."

Dell support was awesome. Then, during the off-shoring mania that swept boardrooms across the country in 2001, Dell fired all their on-shore support and routed our calls to guys in India who make Microsoft's support look good. Sure, Dell has dropped their prices a ton since then, but what matters having productive employees, not saving $100 on their laptop. Dell went the other way - super cheap, low margins, undercutting everyone else, offering crap support. The machines are still pretty good, and lately they've offered "Gold support" on all their products. What morons... don't they know how hard it is to convince your boss to pay $300 for a support contract on an $800 computer? HP went the other way, only offering good support, at higher prices. The difference - happy customers. A couple years ago, my boss overrode my support for Dell, and now all our high-end servers are HP. They're great machines, with incredible support, and we buy them, even though they cost 2X over Dell's.

Tricky talk, in my opinion.

[Futurepower(R)]

My experience with Dell is that the company is tricky. I try to avoid Dell because for me the company does not make a good business partner, which is the relationship you have when you buy something technologically complicated from a company.

Quote from the story: "He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old." [Should be businesses.]

That's a bit tricky, in my opinion. There is no migration path directly from Windows XP to Windows 7. If you are using Windows XP now, it is necessary to re-install ALL your applications, and re-configure ALL your settings. For us, that easily takes 40 hours. Windows XP has had a VERY high cost of ownership for us, and here we go again. Microsoft did not want to finish the work, apparently, and provide a way to convert automatically from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Also, Windows XP is not 8 years old, in my way of perceiving the matter. Windows XP was very troublesome until service pack 2 was released on August 25, 2004. So XP is actually 5 years old, because that is the date of what could be said to be the first release candidate.

It doesn't matter how old an OS is! We are not in the OS business. We are happy with what works for us.

In our experience it is better to buy components and build our own computers. The inside of a mass-market computer is amazing. Everywhere costs could have been cut, the components have been made a little cheaper, and sometimes a lot cheaper.

Well...I agree with him.

[MrCrassic]

After installing Windows 7 (started using it at RC level, I think), everything just feels smooth. It actually made me want to use Microsoft's included products for everything. It definitely has more appeal to me than OS X now.

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated in any way to Microsoft or its subsidiaries. I just really like Windows 7.

Re:Balance Sheet

[gauauu]

The Mac user experience is vastly different than XP and Vista. So much so, that people who switched are not going back to MS anytime soon.

I tried switching. I bought a mac. And I don't like it. (For many reasons, which I won't whine about here). That very different user experience just didn't work for me. So just this week I'm selling my mac and switching to a machine running Windows 7. I like it better than OS X.

Not that most people are like me (and I know one example proves nothing), but I'm the counter-example to your claim, who is happy to switch back.

(Of course, also in consideration is that windows 7 actually runs quite well NOT on new top-of-the-line hardware. I'm running it on a netbook and it's chugging along quite happily.)