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The Ignominious Fall of Dell
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Bill Snyder discusses the ignominious decline of Dell, one akin to that of Computer Associates, leaving the company forever tainted by scandal and a 'shocking breach of faith with customers.' Dell's pioneering business model and supply chain helped make desktop computing ubiquitous, affordable, and secure. But years of awful quality control and customer service have finally caught up to the company in a very public way that will do irreparable damage to the company for years to come. 'What we've learned about Dell recently doesn't qualify as an understandable mistake. Only a rotten company sells defective computers and lies about it.'"
I've been telling my customers for years about how wonderful the hardware that dell uses is. And by wonderful I mean you buy one, hope you get a year out of it, then buy another. I have a stack of Dell/HP/All other junk machine motherboards all with puffed caps. Kind of Makes my job much easier. Customer calls and says thier pc is crashing or wont start. I ask what brand, they say dell, and I know right away what to look for. 2 seconds to open the machine. 2 more seconds to see the puffed caps. 2 minutes explaining why and what happened. 5 minutes later I have a check to build them a new pc. You know. I guess I love dell.
Anyone who outsources manufacturing of any kind has faced this problem. Component suppliers provide defective parts to factories, and when the first parts that contain a defect not seen before arrive, incoming QC hasn't seen the defect yet and so might not test for it. The parts are then used, and if the defect allows the product to pass inspections and burn in, you now have your supply chain infected with product containing the bad part. The consequences of the bad part range from outright consumer danger (e.g. exploding batteries), to shortened product life resulting in expensive warranty repairs and a damaged brand reputation, to very little impact resulting in just a few consumers experiencing annoying problems.
Once you learn of the bad part and the consequences, you're like the CDC (center for disease control). You have to find out how bad the outbreak is, what the return rate is, how much of the supply chain is infected, what the consequences of the failure are, and then decide what should be done about it.
If the failure rate is below, say, 10% and the consequences non-life-threatening, you will likely do nothing and deal with it in the repair channels, and make a running change to your incoming QC processes and manufacturing lines. If there is extreme personal risk you might have to do a recall, and you probably have to suspend your entire supply chain until the root cause is found and everything from raw materials to subassemblies to product in transit to store inventories to consumer's products is fixed.
In this case, Michael Dell was more than likely in the CDC meeting, and data was probably presented that pointed to the fact that a recall wasn't necessary. However, it looks worse than that, and Dell is being painted as a greedy tyrant who shipped bad parts knowing full well he did so.
I guarantee this is NOT the whole story, and there was some serious gray area involved at Dell as to what to do about this issue. More than likely, this was a calculated risk that the problem would not turn out as big as it is.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Thing with Dell is, they seem to go out of their way to blame your use of the product in cases like this. I dealt with the capacitor issue, and we ended up getting sent a stack of about 20 GX260 motherboards to replace ourselves (we were on a remote mine site and couldn't have a dell tech come out every time one died).
However, their handling of the E6500 and E6400 overheating and down-clocking problems has been appalling. They were sold as a high performance laptop, and dell's first question was what software I was running. I'm in an air conditioned office, using a "high end" laptop, it shouldn't fucking matter what software I am running. Despite sending through details of the mass problems people experienced on the internet, and listing the service tags of basically the entire first batch of E series machines we purchased, dell were "unable to replicate" the problem. I had to do a bunch of testing and send through snapshots of what i was seeing to get them to acknowledge that the problem even existed despite massive background info available from unhappy customers on the internet who were also ignored by Dell. Turns out there was a motherboard rev, hence they could not replicate on their newer machines.
Just recently we ordered about 10 more E6500s, all of which have constant network drop outs. The quality control really has gone to shit.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The biggest problem is that consumers don't read tech sites before purchasing, which means they are beholden to the whims of the tech company they are buying from. If they choose to deceive customers it will only become apparent when it's reported by large media organisations.
I think a bigger problem than that is information overload.
I work for a small business. I used to build custom computers in the 90s but haven't felt it's been worth it in a long time.
So what do I buy today for desktops? Dell? Lenovo? HP? Acer? something else?
If I settle on Dell, which models? Inspiron? Dimension? Vostro? Studio? etc. Each of those branches has DOZENS of configurations and differences.
Annoying.
Say what you will about Apple, but their products lines are much easier to grok.
Wait a second. It isn't like these iphone users chose knock off hardware and are now paying the price. The hardware was dictated by Apple and now the customers aren't getting critical security patches because Apple only wants to deal with their most current hardware configs? I would never buy Apple again if they did this to me... No fanboyism necessary.