Over the past 8 years, I've bought many many Dell computers for me and my family. I also bought Dell servers and computers for my business (www.sampa.com). But the change over the last 2 years has been dramatic (anything to do w/ Michael Dell stepping out of the CEO role? Dunno.) Here is my list of 7 things Dell did that put them into trouble (and made HP look like a well-oiled money machine):
1) Support They had it coming. They think they could cut their support cost by 4X without any consequence. Did you ever call Dell recently? My last conversation not only I was treated as an idiot, but at one point I thought I was talking to a speach recognition system since the guy (from India, of course) kept repeating the same things over and over again.
2) Spam It used to be that I'd receive one email a month or so with some promotions. That didn't bother me. But now I receive about 2 emails per week on average. Some don't even look like they are coming from Dell, but they are certainly bringing revenue to Dell, so they must be responsible for it.
3) Pre-installed software First thing you should do when you buy a Dell: reformat the hard disk! That is the only way to get all the crappy software out of there. Before it would come with some Multimedia and anti-virus software, and that was cool, but now it comes with software that doesn't let you forget to buy the full version of Quicken every other week. How nice of them to add a reminder to the boot of Windows? And some other 30 useless crappy default changes. Dell, do you really think that when I open the Search Pane on IE I want to use Dell's Search Engine?
4) Insane Price Strategy Here is Dell's secret to hook you: Sell the base unit for very little money and make money on memory and HD upgrades. Before, Dell was more expensive then HP, Compaq, IBM, etc., but you'd be getting a premium hardware as well. Now, Dell is pretty much the same as everybody else, but they think they can use some Game Console strategy for pricing. Turns out that I can't buy a full system from Dell without feeling cheated. $200 for 1GB of RAM, $200 for a 160GB HD, etc. Heck, I buy a Dell for $500, add all the extras for $500 and just saved $800 from their site.
5) Exploding batteries Denial won't get you anywhere. Toshiba survived some bad times with their laptops as well, and they've got pretty bad PR back them. Why didn't Dell look a history to learn something?
6) Personal vs. Business (small vs. medium-sized) If any business is not buying Dimensions (instead of OptiPlex) it's loosing money. Their business line offers less than their personal line and costs more. Did Dell hire somebody from the aviation industry to teach them how to set price? Not only that, but they have server offerings that have such disparate prices. For example, an entry-level server on Dell might cost you $400, while the next level you'll need to pay around $2000. I assume they create this huge gap to force people to buy the more expensive ones, but again... that feeling of being cheated. True story: one time I've bought 4 servers from Dell for about $4000. The next day I've got a call from a sales rep telling me that I've bought the wrong servers since that line was too entry-level and not reliable enough. Really? The Pentium 4 is different? The HD is different? Thanks, but no thanks.
7) Dude, you're getting a Dell. Ok, maybe the "Dude" was not the coolest kid on the block, according to a teenager, but he sounded pretty cool for the teenager's parents. Dell had a pretty good marketing campaign, and had a very decent brand strategy: "Don't buy a PC, buy a Dell". I'm sure that it worked, since Dell grew steadily during that period, despite the fact it was during the low cycle of the tech industry. Now, quick, can you remember the last Dell commercial that you saw?
8) Promo, promo, promo. I can't buy a Dell anymore without thinking that I'm being duped. Is the price going to drop next week? Will I get double the RAM for free? Or a free upgrade to a flat panel? Has Dell become the Macy's of the PC world? I'm sure the have same SAP software that computes the optimum price and promotion for that week, but are they considering the long term consequences of this strategy?
Dell needs a lot of fixing. It might take a few years after they start making some pretty deep changes for it to take effect. For now, I'll be looking into some HP Servers and some Lenovo or Toshiba Laptops.
For the last two weeks BlogLines has been horrible. I guess they have an upgrade to their system, and a third of the feeds that I read are not being updated at all, and another third display a lot of changes every day, but it is just repeat (I can't see if they really updated their entries).
Now, I'm looking for a new on-line Feed Reader. Suggestions anyone? Google Reader, NewsGator, etc...
My feature list:
Online service that I can access from any my 3 computers (including my Apple laptop);
I had created an account a while ago and never used it. Today I'm trying to migrate my subscriptions from Bloglines to Newsgator and I went there and requested my password, since I've forgot.
Heck, they sent me a clear text password and username!
This tell me that they are either storing the password in clear text on their database or using some encryption (I just hope they didn't implement their own encryption algorithm). Either way, it is retrievable by me, and, by consequence, by anyone on Newsgator (including the employee that disgruntled employee).
IMHO, if you are creating an online service that needs authentication, here are my rules for successfully managing accounts:
Never, ever store passwords of your users. Only store the hashes (MD5 or SHA) and remember to use a Salt for each password.
Let users use their email account as their username. It is very annoying to have to create a username every place I sign up to. I forget those very easily, but I never forget my email (see Google Accounts or Microsoft Passport)
When users loose their password, just send them a link for them to reset it (remember to add a date expiration to that link).
Always, always, use Word Verification (CAPTCHA), when a user is trying to recover a password, or after he fails 2 or 3 times to enter his password. These helps reduce the risk of somebody doing a bot-attack against your service.
And this is easy: Use SSL (HTTPS) whenever a user post his password to your site.
From the above, your user's database should have at least the following data:
Email 1
Email 2
Email 1 Confirmed
Email 2 Confirmed
Salt
Password Hash
Now, I'm no security expert and you should consult your favorite security engineer, but, please, never send my password in clear text. If you took the trouble of setting up a certificate for the HTTPS communication, why do you think that Email is a more secure protocol?
I found two more issues (beside these) with the code:
Email address syntax change
On .NET 1.1 you could set the MailMessage.To to a sequence of semi-colon delimited email address: "abc@abc.com;john@john.com;peter@peter.com"
Now, on the new System.Net.Mail you must use comma to separate email addresses. I guess this is more compliant with the RFC, but it is more annoying for developers. The problem with comma is that quite a few people use comma on their names, like in "John Smitth, DDS", or "Pitt, Brad", etc. And then you need to escape it.
Default Trace/Debug Listener Assert Popup
I'm not sure why, but on ASP.NET 1.1 the default behavior was to have no UI popups (AssertUiEnabled=false on the DefaultTraceListener) for web applications. On .NET 2.0 you get that by default. So, my server was showing these popups but there was no way to click on it because it was done under the service account and it didn't appear on the screen. At least not using Terminal Service (maybe if I had used /console mode?).
Finally, I also noticed that starting up ASP.NET 2.0 it takes a bit longer than 1.1. Before it was about a second or two, and now is more like 5-7 seconds. On the other hand, and this might be just perception, I think the pages are being delivered faster. I take that.
Pluto is not a Planet anymore according to the International Astronomical Union in Prague. The article on Space.com starts with this beauty:
"... billed as a victory of scientific reasoning over historic and cultural influences..."
Following the same "scientific reasoning" I'm proposing that we change the name Atom, which means indivisible, to Tom, which I assume means divisible.
Let me know if you approve the change and we make it official then. And start using phrases like "Tomic Bomb", "Tomic Particle" and "National Tom Museum".
My latest is an exception when setting the subject of a MailMessage (System.Net.Mail). On the .NET 1.1 (using System.Web.Mail), I could stick whatever character on the subject line and it would work, with .NET 2.0 they don't clean up for my sloopy code and I have to clean up myself. What this means? You cannot have CR, LF or other controls characters on the subject, otherwise you get this:
System.ArgumentException: The specified string is not in the form required for a subject.
at System.Net.Mail.Message.set_Subject(String value)
at System.Net.Mail.MailMessage.set_Subject(String value)
The fix, write a Subject line clean up function that removes control characters and replace them with spaces.
Argh!
PS: I read a very large document explaning changes between 1.1 and 2.0, but nowhere the list the issues that I'm finding.
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October, 2007