Dell complaints

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

The company, or the person? Both. Think of every celebrity you ever knew who was in the right place at the right time with the right gimmick and got unimaginably rich. Or even the people you hear about on documentaries who got the right lotto numbers then lost their families and all the money shortly after. Then they lost all grounding, all sense of values, all discipline and self control, became self indulgent and surrounded themselves with toadies who couldn't tell them no.

I'll name a few, but reluctantly because I like most of them and it's disrespectful to the dead to associate their names with Dell. Let's just associate their unfortunate circumstances.

Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Dennis Wilson, Brian Jones, River Phoenix, John Belushi. That's not counting the ones who are still alive but in and out of criminal courts for their uncontrolled behavior, say Britney Spears or Michael Jackson. You might throw OJ Simpson in.

Dell is more like the bumpkin who won the lottery. Unlike our celebrity examples, Dell never had any talent other than hooking up with Mort Topfer, and having an inheritance with which to 'buy the ticket'.

Think there's a rehab for Dell, any more than there was for Britney?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[thanks_for_all_the_fish]

[Padawan2007]

So what you are saying is...

Dell, the Britney Spears of the Computer industry...

Once a prominent force in the industry and soon, notoriety during its fall...

And later - nothing... gone... finished...
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Still... In the midst of the Fire!

[dsavage666]

...don't mind my $0.02. I'll be chucking it around until the price of copper goes up again.

I don't think the celebrity corrollary works. Michael Dell has enough money to make Jacko's weird lifestyle seem mundane and there's NOTHING the regular gears of progress can do about it...but I'll work with the premise.

I'm imagining a rewrite of the script where he doesn't outsource jobs to foreign countries (not directly involved in production or support) and actually puts out a quality product to the home user. It's hard to know if the actor (Dell) has buckled to the (board of) director or whether we've just been played all along.

I haven't had a lot of the C/S and mass production issues as the common person since I special ordered everything but I can say there was MUCH room for improvement.

...I have more to say on this but I'm pretty sure it's for another thread.

Thanks for a space to rant.

-Doc

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

But we come back to the parallel. During Dell's rise, as with MJ's, the product was sturdy and erstwhile, and nothing abominable was known about either one. It was the extremes of success, and the corresponding ability to think of themselves as above conventional standards, that led to both their downfalls.

Yeh, bit of a stretch. You can't directly compare industrialists and entertainers. You can compare the 'rules don't apply to me' mindsets though.
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[dsavage666]

...it's kind of hard to get your head around what happens in an MJ or MD head once you actually have ALL the money you could ever spend...

I know I'd be a kind and benevolent overlord.



-Doc

[Starman97]

That's the truth, MD and MJ live a different world than we do.
They probably live in different worlds from each other, at least MJ does
At the Level of MD, he hangs with sheiks from Dubai and goes to things like Davos Conferences with Billy Boy and other Giga Rich.

I heard him dissing the OLPC project, it was just rehashed one liners fed to him by his handlers and toadies. He can't even comprehend the kids and adults who use these things in small villages in Peru and Africa.

He doesn't go to the grocery store every week to buy food, doesn't put gas in his car, doesn't fly commercial airlines, doesn't write out his bills every month. He doesn't answer to a boss, the Dell Board kisses his ass daily.
When his financial adviser says to 'diversify' , he buys a hotel resort in Hawaii.

Even if he wanted to, he can't just 'drop in' for a chat with some random worker, there's going to be handlers and security, not to mention that most people would sort of freak having the billionaire owner of the company stop by for a 'chat'. So everything he knows goes through multiple levels of filters, that totally distorts his worldview.

Which makes you think, how do most of us know about the rest of the world? Other than through TV and mass media? Any aspect of life that I know a fair bit about or have experience with, seeing it on TV, or in print, it's almost always totally wrong, why would that differ on things that I don't know about?

[Rocke_T_Sinetist]

MD used to walk around and chat with people. I knew a guy who worked there then. Of course he doesn't work there any more, neither does anyone else I knew there, or anyone else HE knew. And MD doesn't walk around, since everyone wants to kill him.

Do you spoze MD only built good stuff at first to acquire a reputation/image he could milk later? Not eggsackly. Even if he IS that fiendish, he's not that smart and doesn't think that far ahead. Rather, at the behest of his consultant he perverted an entire industry when his fortunes began to stagnate in the early 00s.

Notice how, prior to that computers came with a 3-year warranty, which you mostly didn't need, and you got tired of it before it broke? And now you're lucky if it lasts a week? That's the outfall of quarter-think. It goes like this: We'll take all the guts out, people will think they're getting the same box they got before for lots cheaper, our sales will go way up and profit per box stay the same, and we'll take over the world. This quarter.

Mort Topfer--the only visionary who ever set foot inside Dell--coulda told them that wouldn't work past one quarter. But they rode it for 7 years, destroyed the company, destroyed the product and customer relations, and destroyed the industry trying to chase Dell down the same hole. Yeh they should have known better, but they were running on the same quarter-think consultant nonsense Dell was.

The funny thing is, stock value isn't a quarter-think concept. The bulk of investors don't invest for what's happening in the next 3 months. The value left the company before it left the products. All the quarterly finagling, and the stock is worth half of what it was in 1999, in today's dollars which makes it worth even less.

Few companies don't run on quarter-think. I know of one whopping example. Southwest Airlines. They're the cheapest to fly, the most likely to be on time, and profitable every quarter at the same time American and the other majors are losing millions. American runs on quarter-think.

Isn't it about time our leading business schools stopped teaching that?
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Rocke T Sinetist
as in, 'it doesn't take a...'

[incident_man]

big business (MGC)=exploitation=profit=instant gratification. Don't see it changing anytime soon.
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Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

[Starman97]

Even Southwest succumbs to greed.
You have heard about how they stopped inspecting their airplanes and hired a ex-FAA exec to keep the inspectors out of the log books. It's all gravy till a wing falls off and 300 people die.

[Frm_GTS_Tech]

As stated in the original post, Michael Dell was in the right place at the right time. He rode the highs of the industry until 2001. I remember going to the Dell Employees Event in the Erwin Center and seeing Mort Topfer off into retirement. I knew then that good ole Dell Incorporated was screwed at that point. It's been downhill ever since.