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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.'"
"Only a rotten company sells defective computers and lies about it."
Maybe the users are holding them wrong?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
I think it might be a bit early for "Dell is the Devil".
The Invisible Hand of the Free Market is what punches workers in the nuts.
Really is there any PC maker that is 100% great and excellent? I'm sure that Dell's faults aren't any worse than HP, Toshiba's, Gateway's, or any other major maker of PCs.
About the only way you can make sure you get decent PC hardware is to build it yourself or have enough knowledge to sub in and out parts if need be.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Does anyone here care to name a PC manufacturer with a spotless record of turning out nothing but quality, or who has always been 100% up front about dealing with legitimate manufacturing problems?
They've all turned out crap and they've all reliably concerned themselves with their own bottom lines first and foremost. It doesn't excuse Dell, but I can't really see why they need to be singled out either.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Ok, actually RTFA'd and you know what? This article is shit - its premise is shit. The faulty cap story was news in 2005; people got their systems replaced. It was a blip. And you know what? 5 years later Dell is still with us. Snyder is running a beat-up here and I think it's off base.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
"We got greedy."
End of the story. No, seriously. Most companies in this industry have sunk not because their product or brand sucked, or the economy went bad, etc.; Most die because of bad management. Anyone remember Northgate computer systems? Very promising company. If it had maintained its profile it would be bigger than Dell today, but corporate mismanagement torpedoed it during the 90s -- during a period of economic growth and a huge upswing in computer sales.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
hardware reliability or quality, arguably. I just filled out a Purchase order for ~1mil. in dell hardware. all our megacorp cares about is how good is the corporate support, how fast to return parts arrive, how big is the discount.
uptime and scalability are all our concerns. for us to care about dell lying would be calling the kettle black.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let's face it, all corporations are deceitful sacks of s**t. That's the norm for business these days. Presumably it wasn't always like this, but nowadays it's the way it is. Lie, cheat, spin, whatever it takes. If that doesn't work, pretend ignorance and innocence going into the lawsuit. This is modern capitalism.
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.
There cultural values fell by the wayside years ago. The bottom line became the end all and be all of everything. They outsourced everything they could, getting rid of every non-Indian employee they could. Does it come as any surprise that a company that would sell out it's own employees would also sell out their customers?
They got rid of their greatest asset, their people, and with it also got rid of the ethic that made them what they were. Dell was a very hard working hungry company, full of hard working people. Get rid of the hardworking people and you get rid of the hardworking ethos.
You can't outsource ethics. When damage control becomes more important that quality control your company has lost it's way.
The fact is, the consumer doesn't buy reliability. The consumer buys emotional factors, and brand perception, and a good marketer can make the consumer buy any garbage whatsoever.
This is not the end of Dell. Nobody will remember this in a few months, any more than they remember HP and "pretexting" when they buy a printer or a PC.
Bruce Perens.
That's despicable. Why would you RTFA?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I work in higher ed in the state of Wisconsin. We, of course, have a purchasing contract (a mandatory one no less). Because of this, I've been working with Dell (ordering PCs and doing warranty replacements) for a long time now.
In the past, even just 3 years ago, Dell would bend over backwards for us. We got waived on the fees and got waived through the "exams" for warranty parts replacement certification. We could also could get spare parts on hand for PCs. Lastly, we got huge discounts for the UW System and for personal purchasing. Now, however, our sales rep is forcing us to take these stupid, 2 hour exams for replacing parts. We are, of course, overworked and understaffed and I have no time in my week to sit down and "learn" how to replace RAM or swap a power supply. Yet Dell will not budge. When I questioned our sales rep on this he became irate and downright pissy with me.
But, that point is moot really when one looks at the atrocity that is the DOSD (Dell Online Self Dispatch) that replaced the Warranty Parts Direct site. Before my certs expired I needed to get a new DVD R/W drive. I had to scroll through lists and lists of parts, many of which were printer parts, server parts, plastic bezel pieces, etc...things that had nothing to do with the service tag of a standard desktop system.
Dell has hit bottom. Their customer service is shit, their tech support is horrible, and the issues with the bad caps was pretty much the last straw (it's OK to have bad components; the bad part is how they tried to cover it up). I'm done with Dell. I won't recommend them to anyone now.
"This food is problematic."
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!
He should just dismantle the company and give the proceeds back to the shareholders.
A good example of some of the things going on at Dell go like this.
I was hired as Basic Server Support tech.
I was given extra training to take over the graveyard shift from headquarters in round rock.
It was moved to Oklahoma City.
After several months we had done well as a team and were offered Gold level support,
but we would need to apply for that job.
I did apply and I got the position and the night crew became gold level support.
After just a few weeks the platinum crew was so swamped they started dumping
their calls on us and we were required to take them.
We got a few days training and were thrown to the sharks
taking calls way over our heads with little to no prior experience
in the advanced server software arena.
The customers were guaranteed MCSE trained technicians.
Needless to say that is not what they were getting.
Customers were furious and launched into a tirade over the idiocy,
and I did not blame them a bit.
To me this was breech of contract and fraud.
I brought this up in a meeting and was shouted down.
I decided at that point to leave the company.
At the end of the one year I had been there, over
half the ppl working for server support had quit.
1 year after I left my team of 26 only had 3 original members.
The upper management at Dell was THAT bad.
Michael Dell came off his long term vacation and
tried to correct the course of the company, but
the damage had been done and he was lied to as well.
It took him time to work thru all the lies and he fired
a lot of ppl for various reasons.
Some of the low to middle management were actually
good ppl, such as my eventual manager.
He didn't like what they were doing, but he had left
his prior job and had to make this work or lose his
house, his car, and likely his wife.
Fun times...
I keep in touch with some of the ppl still working there,
and after I quit things got better once Mr. Dell could
cut through some of the lies.
I do not think the company will fully recover and it
cannot compete with Asian companies that do not
have all the government regulations, fees, taxes,
and red tape to deal with.
That and they can get workers to work for below minimum wage.
Like most US businesses it is hard to compete on uneven ground.
Good Luck to you all !
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
A whole new generation gets to learn how business works. A company starts and is nothing, why should people buy from it? So the company focuses on quality, low prices and customer satisfaction. People like the company so much they swarm to it. Over the years the company grows larger and larger. Eventually they have capped out their market share, they can grow no more. This is a problem in our growth driven society. We believe that any company that is not growing is failing. So the owners of the company have to grow in other ways, they have to give less to the market they already have... and try to get the market to pay more despite getting less. First the sacrifice from within... departments are cut, benefits are cut, employees are given quotas that grow daily until they are doing so much work they can barely focus on any one thing at a time. Eventually the company realizes it can't cut anymore from within and still function, so it starts looking for cheaper suppliers. Bonuses are given on a yearly basis so an executive can come it, buy tons of faulty components, get his bonus and be gone before the shit hits the fan. Eventually the company is so distrusted by the public they are relegated to a brand name sticker wall-mart sticks on junk it bought from some 3rd party. But the big wigs at the company walk away with their wallets over flowing, open a new start up... rinse and repeat. It's the same with nearly every American business.
From the article linked to this one:
The documents were connected to a lawsuit filed by Web hosting service provider Advanced Internet Technologies (AIT) against Dell in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina on Nov. 1, 2007. AIT sought $75,000 and punitive damages from Dell for breach of contract, fraud and deceptive business practices.
So they WERE found guilty of fraud and deceptive business practices on a small scale with AIT. And so it balloons into a shitstorm even Michael Dell can't sweep under the rug. This is about far more than lemons....
It's the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
People on this site should know that if you buy from Dell, you get it from their Small / Medium Business site.
US tech support & they come to your house to fix the computer within a day or two.
The bonus is that I think the computers are cheaper. If you try to get a powerful PC from Dell, their home models usually force an overpriced under powered video card on you. Good video cards are very expensive from Dell. The Business site allows more choices. It lets you get a good PC with no video card. If you don't need one, use on-board video. If you do need one, get it from newegg.
Note: I do build and overclock PCs, but sometimes if you need something simple it is hard to beat Dell's < $300 computers. I also go with them for the very small form factor PCs and sometimes check out their Refurb Site for Previously Ordered New (returned - not refurb) PCs to see if they have exactly what I am looking for.
The problem is that, back then, Dell lied to their customers about the problem. Then when Dell found out the truth about the problem, they just kept on lying. Lots of those computer actually did not get fixed or replaced. At least half didn't, and apparently most didn't. Dell NEVER did a recall. They should have. People lost money, lost data, lost business, all for Dell's bottom line. Some people never have even found out. Dell told them it was some other problem, that was in the "customer caused" category. People bought some other computer (maybe from Dell, maybe elsewhere), and just didn't deal with it anymore, at a loss.
Once Dell sends every one of those customers a whole new computer that doesn't have any problems for 3 years, then I'll change my tune about Dell.
Disclosure: my employer bought me a Dell laptop in November 2009. It died in April 2010. I got a new one, now. It's been 3 months and it is still working. I have no idea for how long. I don't trust it.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I have one semester, out of four, left on my MBA. I have never heard anyone say, "it is the ethical duty of a business owner to return maximum profit to the shareholder, as reported in quarterly statements."
If it were said, and it were not being said as an example to be torn apart, I would expect any of the instructors, or fellow students, to tear such a position to shreds. It may fit your notion of what is taught in Business School; but, it is not what is actually taught in Business School.
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.
[looks at slashdot user ID] Yeah, you're new here.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Then I guess they're all rotten.
Dell: Numerous examples. I have one of them, the otherwise excellent XPS M1330 that has a defective nVidia 8400M GPU.
Apple: Numerous examples (including right now - iphone). The various iBook motherboard defects also come to mind.
nVidia: The afore-mentioned 8400M remained in production long after nVidia discovered the defect. They kept the defect secret for as long as possible, then when forced to admit it continued selling the faulty part without any warning for users and refused to talk about any arrangements they might've made with individual OEMs for RMA/warranty.
Acer: Frequently sells shoddy hardware and yells "la la la la" loudly when told about it. I have one of those, too, an Acer laptop with a fairly powerful GPU and a cooling subsystem for a basic one, so if you actually use it the GPU overheats and the machine crashes.
Hell, the list is basically endless. Everyone does it, because the consequences are small compared to the profits. Unless that changes, it'll keep on happening, too.
I guess you didn't get the memo. Warrants are passe, especially within a few hundred miles of the nation's border; you can be arrested (anywhere in the country) for carrying large amounts of money (and they'll confiscate it, and you won't get it back); and of course, once convicted of anything at all, you're a permanent member of the new underclass. Not to mention that "innocence" is highly correlated with how much the defendant spends on lawyers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I worked as Dell telephone tech support, I can honestly say they DO know about the issues. Nice big red screen pops up when you call them that says "Do not read this to the customer" it contains a full description of the issue your having 99% of the time. (The E6400's where funny as hell.... and no your not crazy and yes Dell knows about the issue.) Oh did I mention this screen pops up right after we ask "Can I have your service tag number".
Now you're assuming Apple cares about any product more than 2 years old.
What other cell platforms are getting significant updates after two years?
The difference is that Apple just posted 65 critical patches to iOS, half of which allow arbitrary code execution. So you're not getting those now-published and officially acknowledged holes.
And Apple holds your actions illegal if you attempt to fix them yourself.
So it's not just the open publishing of security patches that won't be fixed for old phones, but legally prohibiting the owner from fixing those patches on their own.
Yeah, they won't support it, and legally restrict you from supporting yourself!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Are you familiar with the website "Google"? It's really kind of neat. For instance, watch this:
Google: "Money confiscated"
Very first result:
Isn't that awesome the way that works? You just type in the thing you want a reference for, and there it is. Tech is cool, eh? Also, I assure you that the other matters I referred to... references are just as easily located.
So... if you really wanted those answers, they're right there to be found. Or, you could have asked politely (or even tersely, such as "Cite?") Instead, you wasted time calling me names. Interesting approach. Not likely to get you want you ask for in the general case, just so you know. I just did it to show what an idiot you are, considering that you took the time to call me unjustified names.
Next time think first, type second. Like "Why would he write that..." google... "oh." Or just ask politely. Then you won't have your butt handed to you so neatly packaged.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.