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OCZ May Be On Its Last Legs
itwbennett writes "OCZ, one of the first commercial solid-state drive (SSD) makers has been blaming a shortage of NAND for its woes for some time now, but things have taken a precipitous turn for the worse: 'For its second fiscal quarter ended August 31, 2013, revenue was $33.5 million, a huge drop compared to revenue of $55.3 million for the first quarter of 2013 and revenue of $88.6 million for the second quarter of 2012. The net loss for this quarter was massive, $26 million, a doubling of the $13.1 million loss in the same quarter last year.' The company has burned through cash, its stock collapsed, and now so have sales. Meanwhile, other SSD makers are doing well. So what is happening here?"
We switched from HP to Dell for our enterprise desktop systems, which luckily didn't last long before we switched back. Dell is simply awful in the enterprise. Not just for the higher than average failure rate, that just exacerbated the abysmal service. Dell treated us like consumers, which meant going through every single bullshit checklist they had on the phone before finally decided what they were going to send us. HP has an enterprise service support pipeline that doesn't even require you to get on the phone. It's a web portal where you tell them what you diagnosed and what you need and your part is generally overnighted or two day'd. I'm not sure I would care even if HP had double the failure rate of Dell's (they don't, it's lower) since I could easily deal with 2 or even 3 HP machines in the time it takes me to argue with one Dell tech.
For the record, Dell has the same option, although I have never bothered to sign up for it. I've never had a problem with any of their Optiplex desktops or Latitude laptops (all business-class machines) that wasn't solved by a short call to their support department followed by a next-day visit from an onsite technician to replace the bad part. We do pay extra for a 4-year warranty on all equipment plus accidental damage protection for laptops (which covers physical damage caused by the user). I haven't kept track of failure rates, but have had very few hardware problems in over a decade of buying hundreds of computers from Dell. That said, it would be a cold day in hell before I ever bought one of their consumer-class machines.