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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.
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
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.
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.
You have some very valid points. I've worked in manufacturing.
One thing to remember in this case, however, is the machines in question were not the Dell Crap line machines, they were the premium-quality Optiplex line, where you pay more to get a reliable machine for Enterprise users.
And the bad caps? Not the work of poor QC from a "Chinese peasant", but industrial espionage from some Taiwanese capacitor firms who had engineers steal a formula from from a company in Japan, but got it wrong.
And Dell bought low-end capacitors from cut-rate suppliers. They are not the first to make this mistake, but on your premium line, where you charge premium prices, you should be buying name-brand components. Good electrolytics are expensive.
This story was all covered by IEEE Spectrum. They have a story on the Dell scandal as well.