Dubious Decisions@dell.com

The folks with the inside track on how these things work are scratching their heads this morning over a bizarre announcement from Dell that they are re-entering the personal music player business.

Wired had this to say, "...Three cheers for cockeyed optimism".

Motley Fool lead off with "That's Just Dumb, Dell".

Tech Digest had this to say "So what will it be? An iTunes for the common man? Or an even lower-profile repeat of Zune? My farm is currently riding on the latter".

According to Michael Dell they are looking to expand in to a "broad range of consumer markets".

Good luck with that, after the fiasco with colored notebooks, burning notebooks, melting notebooks, along with several lawsuits and class action suits, and both a financial and managerial crisis to boot, it would seem that Dell is burning every possible bridge to the broader consumer market there is.

dell
dellhell
dell hell

Same Sh*# Different Day@dell.com

A new report today is telling a very familiar story... yet more Dell meltdowns, and it's customers and overheated computers again, rather than the boardroom or the stock.

My own (or rather, my daughters') problem with her Inspiron 9100 was a failed motherboard from overheating, caused no doubt by a faulty design which called for a 3.2 ghz desktop chip in a notebook! Now, I am no expert on the exact problem and am only going on what Dell told me, if I understand them right! They were very kind to offer me 10% off on a refurbished motherboard! Only about $700 installed... on top of the nearly $3000 dollars for the less than 3 year old computer!

And now it appears that a similar problem has cropped up with many dell notebooks and it is traced to an overheating video card... Dell wants to fix it by a new bios which instructs the fan to run at a lower speed, but more often, to assist in cooling. Customers rightly want a replacement card that does not have the current issues with heat! Anyone whose computer has already melted and out of warranty is out of luck.

So the talking heads at direct2dell are no doubt putting a serious spin on this and if you need a good laugh, head on over there and see what they have to say... but then do yourself a favor and follow up with real consumers like us, who are in dellhell... as sad as it all seems folks, we are NOT making this stuff up!!

dell
dellhell
dell hell

Dell beaten by Acer in Europe, about to get beat up in Court.

Dell has just been hit with another blow, it's sales are static in Europe while its competitors keep getting bigger. With overall sales of PC's in Europe up 24% and a staggering 53% for notebooks, the Dell boardroom is likely to be a lively place in the next little while... wonder if it has anything to do with customers who have heard the news of Dell knowingly selling laptops in Europe with US keyboards?

Woes in the boardroom continue with a new class action lawsuit just certified by the courts and laid by Dell employees who claim they were underpaid by Dell. Way to go, Dell!

This is like watching a slow train wreck while the Conductor tells everyone to relax, that everything is fine!


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dellhell
dell hell

Dell Hell - By the Numbers 10

In my last post I stated that if just %1 of the people we tell about our time in Dell Hell never purchased a dell product as a result, I would feel we had gotten our money out of Dell...

But exactly how much is that %1 going to cost Dell in the end?

I tried this once before and didn't get too far... but if I stick to a simple scenario we can get a fair idea. Simple means if we don't know the figure we can just make a fair estimate...

Lets' start with how many people I actually tell our story to, and then figure out what the average person might purchase in their lifetime.

I am going to use a nice round figure of 10,000 people who will have heard our story before we are done. One percent of 10,000 is 100.

So we now have 100 people who will not buy a Dell product because of our efforts.

Now, if the average person replaces a computer every 3 years and assigning a average age of 30 to each person, then they would buy 3 products per decade for the next 4 decades which is 12 products. Lets throw in one peripheral product per decade too, Dell is big on selling you other things besides a computer.

So we have 16 products per person x 100 persons = 1600 products

So lets assign an average of $1200 per product and now we are getting somewhere...

Total cost to Dell for ripping off my daughter is about $1,900,000.00

BUT for each of those persons who don't buy a Dell, let's be fair and figure that they too will divert at least one other customer from Dell... so now the figure doubles itself...

Total cost to Dell for ripping of my daughter is now $3,800,000.00

Makes me feel better now that I have an idea of what my efforts here are worth!!

Dell have behaved atrociously in their dealings with my daughter and it was all so simple to begin with... Do the right thing, replace the faulty computer and win your customer over... or, lie, stonewall, and give them the run around and it will cost you... Now we know how much!

10,000 - Number of people I will reach with my efforts to alert the public to Dells' business practices.

1 - Percent of people we reach who will not buy Dell products.

1600 - Number of product sales lost by Dell as a result of our efforts as described above

1200 - Average cost of individual product sales lost.

1,900,000 - Approximate Dollars lost by Dell as a direct result of our efforts.

3,800,000 - Dollars it cost Dell if you accept that each of the 100 lost customers also tells a friend.

dell
dellhell
dell hell