As a former Dell employee who quit 5 years ago I can tell you that Dell is anything but a straightforward company. Cheap product, cheaper support and a philosphy that once the check clears the bank, the customer is stonewalled. Tech support pretty much knows nothing but how to read a decision tree script to try and solve problems. Don’t tell them what is wrong, the script will tell you. I am scared that our government does anything with this company.
>> the customer is stonewalled.
As a Dell business customer for at least the last six years, I can tell you that support and equipment repair have been fantastic. I had one issue, however, where a RAID drive replacement required first stepping through controller and firmware upgrades (the decision tree). Support offered an onsite tech, but I declined preferring to do it myself which inevitably delayed the repair process because of parts shipment.
I used to assemble my systems, but turned to Dell without regret.
I have no investments with the Dell, or know anybody that works for the company.
HP is worse.
I can understand that and what I (and Gene Eric just below you) said as well. Dell’s product strikes me as fairly industry standard simple. Because of that, I would always look to them first for a laptop, as there are a lot of cheap, spare parts available to fix them. Most manufacturers don’t have that to fall back on. Not that the manufacturers like it, but buyers like the option. So Dell can be a good buy from the “Support” poinjt of view, even if Dell doesn’t supply the support.
I build my own non-laptops every couple of years, so Dell is irrelevant to me there. It does strike me as the old IBM in a number of ways, though: Straightforward product, may not as good as the competition but ubiquitous, a whole world of people who know it, so it all works. It’s predictable and “good enough”. Not a bad position to be in.
It also says that there is a relatively simple corporate culture in the sense that there couldn’t be too many internal power centers or there would be a much more diverse product.