Dell 2.0 faces an uphill struggle

DELL IS IN TROUBLE and it knows it. It's not out for the count, but it's wobbling. For instance, firing your CEO is not usually a good sign of corporate health.

In public - which includes leaking “internal” memos to the Wall Street Journal - Michael Dell is making general statements about reducing bureaucracy, increasing efficiency and using the channel to grow sales. All well and good, but rather lacking in concrete ideas.

I think the rot starts from the bottom and spreads upwards. Dell grew into a major corporate supplier of PCs by starting out as selling customised systems to individuals. You could phone up, or later on, go to the website, pick the exact options you wanted for your PC and it was built for you just the way you wanted it.

Now, it's all a series of model ranges. For example, you want a desktop PC. Go to www.dell.co.uk and click on the "desktops" button. Do you get to start customising? Oh no. You don't even go to the desktop PCs page. First, you have to tell the site if you're a home customer, a small business, a medium-sized one, a public-sector buyer or a large enterprise. Then, depending on which you pick, you could get a Dimension or an XPS or a Precision or an Optiplex - but if you're a home user, you can't have an Optiplex, and if you're a medium to large business user, you don't get Dimensions. And so on.

This is ass-backwards. There's an old maxim in commerce: the customer is always right. Even when the customer is talking nonsense, they're still the customer and thus the boss. It is not Dell's role to tell me which of its systems I am permitted to buy; it is my role, as the buyer, to tell Dell what systems I want it to supply to me.

The problems don't end even if you are content with the ranges Dell sees fit to permit you to select from - which I am not. If I want an Optiplex system to use at home, then that's my right. And indeed I used to, because they were better-built than the relatively cheap'n'nasty Dimensions and much easier to work on.

For example, a true story. As well as writing for a living, I'm a freelance consultant, building and maintaining networks for small businesses. A while ago, a client of mine bought a system without consulting me first. It was to be a high-performance graphical workstation and the small local company they chose don't really know about such things. First they recommended a dual-core P4, but couldn't get it working reliably, so they recalled it and replaced it with a dual-core Athlon. They recommended 4G of RAM, even though 32-bit Windows can't effectively use that much and only 3.25G is accessible to the OS. They don't offer 64-bit Windows - they don't know how to work it.

And, presumably because they'd read in the comics that it was faster, they recommended two Nvidia graphics cards in SLI - despite the fact that the system was being bought with two monitors for dual-head operation and SLI doesn't work with dual-head. SLI only speeds up some games, anyway, it does nothing for graphical modelling and image analysis.

So far, a typical tale of small business incompetency.

The twist came later, though, when the company wanted a second such PC. They weren't going to go back to Clueless and Lackwit PC's [and yes, the apostrophe is intentional] so they shopped around for a big, reputable name this time - like Dell. However, they already had a spare expensive high-end graphics card sitting on the shelf, unused and unusable for the purpose it was originally purchased for.

So they wanted a fully-built PC, with Widnows and a monitor, but with no graphics card. They also quite fancied a RAID in the new machine rather than two big separate disks.

Can you buy this from Dell these days? Can you buggery.

You will choose a graphics card. You will choose a monitor, keyboard and mouse, even if you already have them and don't want to replace them. You want RAID? Sure, buy a server. You don't want a server? No RAID for you then. Not interested in a Core2 with only 2MB cache, you want the full 4MB cache version? If it's not in that model range, get lost.

It reminds me of the introduction to the film of Trainspotting: "Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family..." You know the one. All the choices that aren't really choices at all. But as the closing line goes: "I chose not to choose life: I chose something else."

In the end, my client went to Scan, as it happens, who happily supplied an immaculately-constructed, well-specified high-end 3XS PC, preloaded with Windows, with no graphics card.

But if you want that from Dell - tough. Not an option. You'll take what you're given and like it.

My suggestion to Dell's management: forget "Dell 2.0", forget streamlining your corporate structure and all that management double-talk. Instead, listen to your customers and give them what they ask for, not what you think they ought to have.

Let's see real freedom of choice, so we can select exactly what we want and nothing more. Pick a case, pick a processor, pick a motherboard from a selection of ones that will fit your first choices. If they want a system with no hard disks or 3 screens, that's up to the customer, let them decide. If they want no operating system, give them no operating system, and charge less for the resultant Windows-less system. If they want a bare copy of Windows with no bundled craplets, deliver it.

Another true story. Another client of mine decided last year to upgrade the RAM in his Dell without my assistance, forced the DIMMs in the wrong way round and killed his motherboard. I had to build him a new machine in a new case with a new motherboard - but keeping all his other components. Snag: a Dell-installed copy of Windows won't run on anything else. It just blue-screens on startup. You can't get clean install disks from Dell, just disks to re-image their preloaded install, complete with craplets and drivers and everything else - which won't work if your Dell CPU and Dell RAM and Dell hard disks and Dell optical drives and Dell floppy drive and Dell keyboard and Dell monitor are attached to a non-Dell motherboard. So we had to get another copy of Windows.

This sort of thing doesn't just apply to small outfits. If you're a big company with an enterprise licence for Windows, why should you have to buy thousands of PCs with preinstalled Windows which you will then wipe and image with your company build?

Once upon a time, I specified entire corporate networks based around Dell kit and we were well pleased with it. No longer. The prices are still keen but now all you can do is pick from the range of bundled rubbish that Dell offers you, preconfigured in their often nasty and unsuitable configurations. You can't build your own system online any more.

Well, sod that, and so long as it continues, sod Dell. I still buy Dell servers regularly - they're cheap, well-built and do the job. I get them without an operating system and put Linux on them and they run reliably for years on end. But workstations? Not a chance.

Fix this - cut out the disease at the root - and perhaps the rest will flourish once more.

And the same applies to the legions of copy-cat companies who tried and are trying to ape the fallen giant's style. µ