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Lawsuit Shows Dell Hid Extent of Computer Flaws
Geoffrey.landis writes "According to an article in the New York Times, documents revealed in a lawsuit against Dell show that the computer maker hid the extent of possible damages due to a faulty capacitor in the computers it shipped from 2003 to 2005. Dell employees were told, 'Don't bring this to customer's attention proactively,' and 'emphasize uncertainty.' (PDF) 'As it tried to deal with the mounting issues, Dell began ranking customers by importance, putting first those who might move their accounts to another PC maker, followed by those who might curtail sales and giving the lowest priority to those who were bothered but still willing to stick with Dell.' In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment."
This will surprise precisely no one who's ever done business with Dell.
Wow who would have thought that some company in America was covering up, down playing, putting the blame on someone else, etc... on some bad news? Did anybody notice that the sky was blue today?!
http://www.badcaps.net/forum/index.php
It was more than just Dell having capacitor issues left and right.
Morphing Software
And take the lowest bidder from China...
And outsource your inspection, testing and QC,...
You deserve what you get. I am actually sorry to see this happen. I expected more professional management system.
How is it possible for the free market to not result in better products and service?
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
IMO, the important thing about this article is they finally reveal the source document their claims came from. This is important, especially because of the kind of comments the last Ars Technica article about this lawsuit had.
This isn't just capacitors. I almost stopped doing business with dell completely after a client came to me with a clearly failed nvidia chip on a model that had the warranty extended for just that problem. They had called dell during the warranty period and were told it was an issue with the OS and they needed to reinstall. They trusted dell. They reinstalled. They updated their firmware. The computer lasted another few months with the problem getting progressively worse until there was no video at all. I tested the system and determined definitively that it was the nvidia chip and asked dell to replace the board. I was given the runaround being told how do I know and its out of warranty. I pointed out that the warranty had been extended and my customer had called them during that timeline and was given bad information by their support team. They fought it and fought it and fought it some more until I called the rep that I do large orders with for corporate clients, and apologized to him that I would not be ordering anymore servers etc. from him. I explained the situation and was called back by dell corporate the next day offering to swap the bad board for a refurbished one. It solved the problem, but it really shouldn't have to go that far. I love using dell servers, but having experiences like that do not make me want to use their products.
Get a web developer
The US Federal Government buys more Dell machines than any other major customer. And Dell sucks, really really hard.
Sure, their server hardware is OK, but it's just off the shelf stuff which is more expensive than a lot of competition, including the superb Supermicro. So, the only conclusion is that Dell has employees that suck a really good dick.
Now this comes out. I wonder what the total damage done to the taxpayer was? Probably in the hundreds of millions when you figure in the lack of services caused by downtime, contractor handoffs of parts before they actually get the problem fixed, and subsequent testing which is mandated at many facilities.
In other words, the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
Political parties do much the same thing. The so-called base voters who would never consider voting for the other party (or staying home) can be and generally are ignored by candidates because they know their votes are secure.
Loyalty is a terrible position for a customer (or voter) to take. If you want results, insist on getting them up front, before you fork over the cash (or votes, or, in our political system, both).
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Of course they prioritized the situations with the most impact to them.
What's wrong with that?
However, selling computers with an enhanced probability of failure at the same price as if they didn't have that is fraud.
And "reassurances that no data loss would occur when a PC failed" is just gob-smackingly stupid fraud.
i get the analogy, but dude, get a throwaway phone - lots cheaper and no contract... hope your dad is OK, btw
Dell may have been more customer-antagonistic than other manufacturers, but even alleged luminaries in the business were tainted by this issue.
My first Apple base station was based on a Lucent design that Apple put a graphite-colored plastic enclosure around. Naturally, the Job/Ivs-ian approach to mechanical design did not allow these base stations to have ventilation holes in them, even though they had a comparatively big internal linear power supply and were using a 486 chip. Combine that with all the remaining hardware and you had a nice hot little box, especially if you used the dial-up modem. A year later, and the marginal Lelon capacitors powering the the base station started bulging like Champagne corks or popping off altogether.
Naturally, Apple told its customers that the they were SOL if the unit was out of warranty after a year of ownership. Those who had AppleCare warranty could get refurbished units - usually in marginal cosmetic condition - and only if they mentioned that AppleCare covered attached peripherals. Apple never proactively contacted owners of graphite base stations to acknowledge the issue and to point owners towards repair options.
I got mad enough to investigate the issue, discovered the bad capacitors and created a web-page to teach others how to replace them or have service providers replace the capacitors for them. Not that hard to do. I also gave folk instructions on how to add ventilation holes to help these poor base stations cool better. The Lucent design covered much of the board with an EMI shield, which exacerbated the thermal problems - it's like encasing the electronics inside two heat shields.
As the issue affected more and more customers, Apple started a non-publicized warranty program that allowed customers outside the warranty period to get their unit replaced - but only if they knew what knowledge-base article to point the Apple drones to. Naturally, just as the program appeared one day, it also disappeared after a while - without a press release, notice to customers, etc.
All along, the typical answer from an Apple phone-drone was that they had never heard of the issue before. So, if you did a little digging at Apple, I would not be surprised if the SOP manuals for phone-drones include the 'suggestion' that every issue reported by an irate customer is 'unusual', 'never heard of before', etc. It's one way to mollify customers, especially those who don't know of the myriad of other customers affected by the same issue.
The only times I had Apple admit something outright was with the Santa Rosa graphics chipset problem, and probably only because by MacBookPro was covered under AppleCare. However, by then, a lot of of other folk had already been affected by this issue and NVIDIA was presumably paying for the PCB repairs. So I'm not sure if I can give Apple a pass on that one either. The first sets of customers were probably told that unless the unit was under warranty or AppleCare that they'd be buying a new motherboard and paying Apple for the privilege of getting it installed too.
Would the base stations have lasted longer if Apple had elected to use name-brand capacitors instead of Lelons? Perhaps, but any electronic appliance last longer with lower operating temperatures. Sadly, this is an issue that seems to continue to haunt Apple - a desire to design pretty enclosures whose thermal performance is at the borderlines of what the electronic hardware can tolerate.
the most loyal customers got the worst treatment.
In business loyalty is foolish. You always get better deal by shopping around. This is also true with jobs and women.
Jehovah be praised, Oracle was not selected
We had almost 90% of our GX270 desktops (about 200 deployed at the time) fail due to the bad cap issue, and Dell Canada repaired every single one within 24 hours, no questions asked. Since then we’ve had near zero issues with any Dell laptops or desktops (over 1,000 deployed and in use), and the few failures we’ve had since then Dell has fixed without any hassle.
Dell Canada never gave us a hard time over repairs for the bad cap problems. Whenever we placed a support call all it took was a mention of “blown caps” and they immediately sent over a tech & parts for onsite repair. By all accounts we were a “loyal customer” but certainly did not receive “the worst treatment”.
Either Dell USA grossly mishandled the bad cap issue in their own backyard or there were a lot of Dell customers out there that didn’t arrange for proper support (by not purchasing through Dell Corporate) and purposely skimped on their warranties.
Rogers wouldn't even call me back when I was in the hospital with my dad who was going into major surgery.
I hope you're dad's okay now, but I have to ask -- what kind of cell phone problem hospitalizes your father and requires major surgical intervention?
~Idarubicin
Actually Verizon is damn near the worst I have ever encountered.
Same brand of junk, different episodes.
"Let's bill your hardware charge to an account we'll close on you in 2 weeks from our side and then send it to a collection agency who sits on it for 4 months". That takes 4 hours to fix with your described Turbo Transfers. "Let me get you to billing. - No, we only handle Pennsylvania, let me get you your area - Oh, I am only billing, I can't take your credit card - I have no idea what that charge is, let me transfer you - ..."
Then they are just barely able to install a dry-loop DSL with 11 phone calls over 3 weeks.
The only thing is, the reputation of Comcast scares me more so I haven't yet switched.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I used to work as a systems administrator for the company suing dell, AIT, and to be honest from the setup we were required to use you could not tell whether the problem was because of dell or the high heat on the machines. The problem stems from the owner of the company's desire to cut costs anywhere he could. He stopped buying actual servers and went to buy desktops and sold dedicated hosting services on them as though they were servers. We would have groups of 3 pizza racks stacked with 12 of the VCR dells per shelve. The heat from all the machines was terrible, we even had plastic melting on some of the machines. To cool the system we had 2 used industrial ACs, that were always breaking, in addition we had 3 of the large stand up fans that really did no cooling at all. What is really ironic about this suit is that the company at the time advertised nightly backups on all accounts, however only about 1% of the customers, the ones on our netapp, was actually backed up. For the rest the company would not buy the hardware to actually backup customers.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Having had comcast for the past 4 years or so, I can honestly say that they are better than THAT. At least in North NJ
You married your mom?
Learn to love Alaska
I'm not exactly sure why I was modded troll for this. The problems that HP had with DV2xxx and DV6xxx notebooks, particular with the nVidia chipsets is well known, as is HP's refusal to properly deal with widespread issues of overheating and damage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They were simply trying to use up their spare parts inventory and string the customers along until they were out of warranty service contract. That's dishonest.
Actually, I think from a legal perspective, Dell was colouring between the lines, if the contract was for Dell to replace the system as often as it failed within the warranty period.
You might complain that it's not ethical given the business image that Dell put forward. Obviously they decided that their short term reputation with share holders was worth more than their long term reputation with customers.
Given the size of the problem (across the industry) I'm not sure there were enough good capacitors available to replace all the defective boards with non-defective boards. I think it also took a while to figure out which capacitors were the good capacitors.
Given the shortage and lead time, if you tell everyone about the problem up front, you're encouraging a run on a bank that's essentially insolvent.
Suppose that Dell decides to man-up and announce a broad recall of millions of mainboards, but you're 18 months away from having enough replacement boards to go around. They could offer some kind of rebate to people electing to keep their could-blow-tomorrow systems. Many won't bite. You'll still have to pro-rate replacements. Dell's big dog accounts are going to expect the lion's share and you can't afford to make these people mad. If you say to every customer who purchased fewer than 100 systems "no soup for you" that's not going to play well in the echo chamber, either. Sounds like a PR fiasco at least equal to the sleazy approach they chose.
OTOH, deciding to manage this by marooning thousands of busy technicians on phone lines to call centers in India with people pretending to comprehend English less well than they actually do is something the market should severely punish.
I wish the suits so enamoured about dealing with big and established companies were the same people suffering telephone hell when big company doesn't man-up to their service contracts. Not that it would change how the world works all that much, but it might cut down on some of the intolerable bluster.
...because this post is in response to those who espouse "the man fucked us over again" attitude you see a lot of here.
Just for a minute, step outside your cubicle and put yourself in charge of Dell.
First of all, you have no choice but to manufacture your laptops in China, Viet Nam, Malaysia or some other God-forsaken country because it takes a lot of labor to assemble your products, all your competitors do the same thing and people want a full featured laptop for $599. If you stamp a "Made in USA" sticker on the box and charge $899, a price at which you'd lose money if you built it here, your product sits on the store shelf like an old turd.
Secondly, you have to source subcomponents like capacitors (or in the case of Mattel, paint for Barbies) from a network of vendors within the country you're building in. This sub-supplier network could go 3 or 4 or more companies deep by the time you get down to the raw materials used to make the parts.
Of course you got samples, tested the shit out of them, and insisted that all the components and sub components come only from approved suppliers. You put in incoming QC tests to make sure the parts adhere to spec, but it simply isn't possible to test every single component every single time they come in. You've got ongoing WIP tests at every step of the way to make sure the subassemblies and end product stays in spec.
Then some peasant in Northern China decides to send some bad raw materials used to make the capacitors used in the Dell (and other) machines up the stream to the capacitor factory. The factory making the caps has no idea the material is bad and the caps test out fine. They only fail over time so they pass any and all incoming QC tests your factory has put in place, and the end computer they go in tests out fine before shipment.
Then you get the first return from the field. And then the second. After root cause analysis, you finally recognize that the capacitor is faulty, and basically you then say Holy Fucking Shit. Because the lead time to get the caps was 12 weeks, and by that time you've got 150,000 suspect machines in the field, another 150,000 in work in process, and another 150,000 worth of parts in the parts bins waiting to be assembled.
You now have to figure out how and why machines fail, over what time span, and under what usage patterns. Will this thing burn down a customer's house!? How badly are you fucked in terms of warranty - how many machines will fail before the warranty is out, and what is the company's exposure? What about all the stuff in the supply chain - do you pay to have it reworked or do you deem the risk low enough that you continue to build and ship?
Then, you start the customer triage process. Who are the most strategic customers that will have the most downside due to the failure? Do we do a proactive recall, or wait until machines fail and come back in? if we don't do a recall, do we alert the public or just wait and deal with the failures as they arrive and hope it doesn't get any worse?
Of course, as part of this process, you've found the mother fucker in China who screwed you, had him shot, then put in tests to make sure this never happens again, and tried to get some sort of money out of the sub supplier to cover the millions you have at risk due to this problem. Good luck with that, by the way.
Then some douche bag on Slashdot calls you a greedy pig for not replacing every machine without question.
Welcome to the world of the manufacturer.
And by the way, the above if GROSSLY simplified to enhance comprehension.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!