Dell Hell - By the Numbers 15

Well, this one is going to be fun, I love doing the "By the Numbers" blogs because they give us a chance to quantify disaster. So let us jump in at the deep end... the deep end being in the cesspool of Round Rock Texas, corporate HQ of Dell and spiritual home of DellHell.

94 - Number of related news stories on Google News regarding Dells dirty dealings as pointed out over the last few days on this blog and many others. And those 94 sites actually have readers, unlike this one! They include PC WORLD, NY TIMES, CNN MONEY, NPR, THE GUARDIAN and a host of other mainstream news outlets... ENGADGET, a well respected tech magazine had my favorite headline of the bunch "Dell responds to latest capacitor-related fallout, ignores the whole lying to consumers part"

50,000 - A random figure representing readers per media outlet above. We have no way of estimating the actual readership of the articles so we are using 50,000 just for the mental exercise here. I mean we ARE talking the NY TIMES and PC WORLD...

4,700,000 - The estimated number of people who have read the articles about Dell delinquency using our figures above.

47,000 - Number of lost customers if only 1% of those people never buy another dell because of this bad publicity.

705,000 - Number of products lost if each person were to have purchased 15 items in their remaining lifetime.

70,500,000 - Dollars lost to dell from those customers.

Now lets have some real fun... remember we are just using figures from the top of my head and I am trying to be fair and simple.

470 - Number of execs with purchasing power at their company who are 1% of the lost customers above

1000 - Computers and accessories purchased every 5 years by each of the execs

2,820,000 - Product sales lost by dell during the career of these execs (30 years)

2,820,000,000 - Dollars of lost sales over 30 years because of this scandal

So we can see from even this simplistic exercise that Dell will take a VERY significant hit from this shoddy behavior, especially if one considers the $300 million in fines they are on target for, and remember that this behavior was encouraged by the top executives, perhaps a shareholder revolt is in order before the fire in the barn in Rim Rock becomes a 5 alarmer and burns down the whole place.