news.com.com— "You would have thought, in view of the week's events, that Michael Dell would show up at a greet-the-folks gathering here Friday looking like some whiter shade of pale."
Aug 19, 2006View in Crawl 4
I'm sorry but let's be realistic here. Ok Sony's made lots of mistakes recently. But if you look at their past, historically they've always made quite a lot of mistakes (Betamax, Minidisc, Memory Stick). Sony is far from dying. Their market encompasses all electronics, and lots of people, when they look for TVs for example, still think of Sony as the premium brand and pay an Apple-like premium for it. It's their cash cow just like Windows is Microsoft's. Sony is like an octopus, and maybe on or two of the tentacles have been damaged lately, but the rest ain't going anywhere for a long time, for better or for worse.
I think Dell has some much, much bigger problems than that. Like their razor-thin margins. Dell has been historically smart at cutting costs down very low and being the cheapest at everything, but with the rise of companies like Lenovo with access to cheap labor, I don't see Dell surviving on being a low cost PC manufacturer for more than 5 - 10 years tops. That's why they're purchasing companies like Alienware and marketing high-cost high-margin PCs and those nice big beautiful monitors. My thought is that Dell is going to have a pickle of a problem convincing people that their stuff is worth paying a premium for after all these years, but only time will tell.
Dell most likely muscled Sony to try to get the cheapest price possible for their batteries. As a result I suspect Sony may have cut corners to get the business. Dell traditionally tries to squeeze their suppliers. This combined with their mediocre customer service, all Dell for support and you wind up in one of their overseas call centers or transferred to multiple people before getting a problem resolved (sometimes).Hopefully, Dell a fine, large great company will take this blackeye to heart and change their ways. We shall see. Spending millions on advertising won't erase bad PR and crummy customer service. This will take a change at the top.Looking for a refurbished laptop, check out www.usedlaptops.com. We believe in Dell and have been regularly purchasing refurbished laptops from their Leasing Group.
weareglassAug 20, 2006
I'm sorry but let's be realistic here. Ok Sony's made lots of mistakes recently. But if you look at their past, historically they've always made quite a lot of mistakes (Betamax, Minidisc, Memory Stick). Sony is far from dying. Their market encompasses all electronics, and lots of people, when they look for TVs for example, still think of Sony as the premium brand and pay an Apple-like premium for it. It's their cash cow just like Windows is Microsoft's. Sony is like an octopus, and maybe on or two of the tentacles have been damaged lately, but the rest ain't going anywhere for a long time, for better or for worse.
weareglassAug 20, 2006
I think Dell has some much, much bigger problems than that. Like their razor-thin margins. Dell has been historically smart at cutting costs down very low and being the cheapest at everything, but with the rise of companies like Lenovo with access to cheap labor, I don't see Dell surviving on being a low cost PC manufacturer for more than 5 - 10 years tops. That's why they're purchasing companies like Alienware and marketing high-cost high-margin PCs and those nice big beautiful monitors. My thought is that Dell is going to have a pickle of a problem convincing people that their stuff is worth paying a premium for after all these years, but only time will tell.
Closed AccountAug 20, 2006
I said to myself "Dell, that means Apple will be mentioned within 10 posts".Currently the first Apple post is #5.
oldlaptopsAug 20, 2006
Dell most likely muscled Sony to try to get the cheapest price possible for their batteries. As a result I suspect Sony may have cut corners to get the business. Dell traditionally tries to squeeze their suppliers. This combined with their mediocre customer service, all Dell for support and you wind up in one of their overseas call centers or transferred to multiple people before getting a problem resolved (sometimes).Hopefully, Dell a fine, large great company will take this blackeye to heart and change their ways. We shall see. Spending millions on advertising won't erase bad PR and crummy customer service. This will take a change at the top.Looking for a refurbished laptop, check out www.usedlaptops.com. We believe in Dell and have been regularly purchasing refurbished laptops from their Leasing Group.
Closed AccountAug 21, 2006
I dunno my dealings w/ dell tech support always went well.. they had no problem mailing me new drives, etc.