Dell's past catching up?Apr 19th, 2007 - 16:41:40

Years of zero innovation and using the very lowest-cost and -quality components... Purchasers can only be fooled so many times. Dell laptops were infamous for years for awful screens, for example, so even if they are better now, burned customers who, thanks to Dell's absence from retail, cannot see whether things are better are going elsewhere.

As to their service, I used to maintain lots of Dell server/storage equipment; years ago their TX techs were awesome, whenever we had failed parts it only took minutes on the phone with a savvy, smart tech to get a replacement part mailed out once their tech figured out we knew whereof we spoke. More recently, that turned to drones 'somewhere in some call center' with inflexible, rigid, insulting, useless scripts (which, in fairness, they were forced to read or they got fired) - and we stopped buying Dell when a few minutes turned into hours or days of hold, transfer, hangups, etc. etc.

Good luck to Dell fixing all this. They used to make pretty decent equipment, have a decent web site, and good support. Now they make stuff I'd be careful of going near, have a horribly cluttered and upsell/cross-sell-heavy web site, and support... well, 'nuff said.

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Sk1pprApr 19th, 2007 - 17:49:31

I've also noticed a dramatic drop in quality of PCs and service with Dell the last few years. I used to recommend family members by Dell systems so I could tell them to call Dell for help instead of me, but lately that's backfired. I'd like to point them someplace else but the drop in service quality seems to be industry wide, even among a lot of hardware manufacturers, so I've resigned myself to endless free service calls to my less tech-savvy family members.

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