August 2006 - Posts

• Dell Response to Wall Street Journal Article

  Thu. Aug. 31, 2006
  by Ro Parra, Sr. VP, Home & Small Business

  Some of you may have seen yesterday's story that appeared in the Wall Street Journal (subscription required). Our view is that it only tells part of the Dell story. What’s missing is the progress we’re making against four key areas for consumer and small-business customers: post-sales customer experience, sales customer experience, pricing simplification, and improving how we reach customers through marketing.

  The online community is important to us. More than half of our consumer customers buy from us through the Internet. You’ll be hearing more from me and other members of the Dell blog team about changes we’re making for the better across the business. Meanwhile, here’s the letter I sent to the Wall Street Journal in response:

  Letter to the Editor: “It’s Time for the Full Story”
  Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2006

  After reading Wednesday’s A-1 story on Dell, we wondered what happened to the other half of the article. To the Journal’s credit, it factually rehashed many of the issues we have acknowledged and addressed for some time. We long have explained how our business is split between corporate and consumer customers, the former comprising about 85 percent of our sales. In fact, we are larger in corporate segments than the next three competitors combined.

  What was missing in the story is more fundamental. U.S. consumer customers, like all customers, are important to Dell—we sell more PC’s to them than any other company in the world. They are a part of the reason we widened our lead last quarter to a global industry leading overall share of 19.2 percent. We are quite proud of this result and we are very committed to each and every customer.

  Our U.S. Consumer business grew from 6 percent share in 2000 to nearly 29 percent share this past year. This is perhaps the best reflection that consumers believe in the Direct Model. We don’t know a better measure.

  Dell is also growing faster than the industry in all high-growth international markets and recently earned the No. 2 share position in Asia and No. 2 in Japan. Critics and pundits may find it interesting to question our model, but customers are not and the results continue to show this progress.

  The best is yet to come for our customers, employees and all stakeholders. We look forward to seeing the Journal write the other half of the story soon.

  Ro Parra
  Sr. VP, Home & Small Business
  Dell

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• Improving Battery Standards

  Thu. Aug. 31, 2006
  by John Grosso, Dir. - Supplier Eng. & Quality

  In an earlier post, Lionel mentioned an organization called IPC, and asked me to share some details about the group, my role in it, and to discuss the upcoming tech summit, which happens next month in San Jose. I talked about this recently with eWEEK, but wanted to share more perspective.

  The IPC is a trade organization that has evolved since its inception in 1957. They started out as the “Institute for Printed Circuits”, became the Institute for Interconnecting and Packaging Electronic Circuits, and when nobody could remember their name, they just became the IPC. Over the past several decades the IPC focused on bringing users, suppliers, equipment manufactures, and raw material manufacturers together to create standards for printed wiring boards and then printed wiring board assemblies. Almost all military specifications were folded into the IPC standards, they established a process to be ANSI recognized, and are now a global standards entity. IPC has over 100 active standards and 100 volunteer committees, subcommittees and working groups devoted to standards development. Based on their track record of bringing standards to industry, I reached out to their VP of Industry programs, Tony Hilvers, and inquired about their desire to open up to other commodities. The folks at IPC were excited about venturing into “unknown” waters and away we went!

  My role as the Chairman of the OEM Management Steering Council is to seek participation from companies who have a vested interest in commodity standardization, bring subject matter expertise, and are committed to changing the industry. I work through the IPC to set up meetings, agendas, scope standards, measure execution, and look for the next opportunity. It’s a great environment and I’ve met some really good folks. Currently sitting on the Council are Apple (Gary Roberts), Cisco (Paul Bennett), HP (Glen Griffiths), IBM (Joe Lisowski), Lenovo (Nancy Bolinger), Lucent (Neil Witkowski), and Motorola (Greg Schneider).

  The upcoming summit will bring together users of lithium-ion batteries (Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, Polycom are confirmed to date) to develop and deploy manufacturing standards which will be used by suppliers of lithium-ion cells. We are emulating the existing environment for PCB (Printed Circuit Boards) and PCBA (Printed Circuit Board Assemblies) which has proven to be extremely successful. We will scope this document, commit resources, and set the timeline. Our primary goal is insuring a safe and reliable cell delivered each and every time to our customers. We’ll communicate progress or key developments periodically on this blog and elsewhere.

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• XPS 700 International Customers; Custom Cable Inquiries

  Wed. Aug. 30, 2006
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Some customers from Canada have pointed out that they were not given the option to upgrade their processor from a Pentium-D or choose a gift option like I had reported in an earlier post. My apologies to those people. Would recommend that you contact your sales representative directly to address these concerns. Otherwise, you can submit a comment to this blog entry with an email, phone number, order number that I won’t publish. I’ll get your information to teams that can help. 

  For EMEA or Latin American customers: if you have outstanding issues, please send me your order details as a comment that I won't publish. Again, I'll get this information to teams that can help.

  In my last XPS 700 post, I had said that the XPS 700 system we’ve offered will accommodate an industry-standard BTX system board. Several of you have asked me to elaborate on the custom cables that will be required. Don’t have further details to share yet. As a reminder, the Dell system board supports Pentium-D, Core 2 Duo processors, and Core 2 Extreme processors.

  Working to clarify more details on the Sound Blaster X-Fi, and hope to have an update on the NVIDIA 7950 soon.  As always, want to thank each and every XPS 700 customer.  We'll continue working through the backlog of orders as quickly as we can.

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• Green Recycling Options

  Tue. Aug. 29, 2006
  by Tod Arbogast, Director—Sustainable Business

  As Dell’s head of Dell Sustainability, I’m focused on ways you can integrate environmental responsibility into the way you buy, use and dispose of your computer equipment. We offer customers two broad options:

  Donate it. When you are finished using your computer consider donating it to a non-profit organization. While you may have outgrown its features, an organization that cannot afford technology may be able to use it for years to come.

  Dell connects customers to donation opportunities through the National Cristina Foundation, which will make arrangements to pick up the equipment and put it to good use. Additionally, Dell and Goodwill have joined in support of putting people to work through the donation of computer equipment under the Reconnect Partnership currently available in some markets in the U.S. Reconnect takes advantage of the existing donation and retail infrastructure of Goodwill and the recycling experience and resources of Dell to offer a proactive, community-based solution to environmentally responsible electronic disposal.

  Recycle it. As many of you know there are better options than throwing an old computer out in the trash, especially because many computers contain some environmentally-sensitive materials. Moreover, materials in a computer can be recycled and reused.

  Dell is committed to making it easy, convenient and affordable to dispose of end-of-life computers. We recognize our responsibility to recycle the products we make and sell. And our recycling partners are managed to high safety and environmental standards, which we enforce through regular audits. Importantly, we prohibit the landfill or export to developing nations of environmentally-sensitive materials.

  Here is a vlog from Kate Krebs, Executive Director of the National Recycling Coalition, who shares her views on Dell’s recycling initiatives.

  

  For consumers, we are excited to soon provide you free recycling of any Dell-branded product, whether or not you are purchasing a replacement product. Dell is the first in our industry to offer consumers this free recycling option. See this PDF for more details. You can also listen to this webcast from Michael Dell. We will also continue to offer consumers free recycling of any brand of used computer or printer with the purchase of a new Dell computer or printer. And for our business, government and education customers, we offer Asset Recovery Services, providing logistics and disposal capabilities to responsibly recover owned and/or leased computer equipment.

  Due in part to our list of recycling options we provide our customers, we shared the top spot with Nokia in Greenpeace’s recent guide to green electronics. In their PDF report on Dell, Greenpeace lowered our overall score because we don’t currently offer PC models that are free of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) or brominated flame retardants (BFRs). We have established timelines to limit the use of both—more on that in a future post.

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• Virtualization Beyond the Enterprise

  Mon. Aug. 28, 2006
  by Kevin Kettler, Chief Technology Officer

  Food for thought from David Berlind at ZDNet… This goes back to what I talked about at LinuxWorld in April where I articulated a vision along these lines.

  Up to now, enterprise needs have driven virtualization. I believe this will change with the move to client virtualization—unbinding the OS from the platform opens up cool new opportunities on the desktop.

  In a virtualized environment, multiple virtual machines run different environments on the same platform. One could be running a secure Web browser so that viruses or malware can’t trash the rest of the system; another could run a dedicated gaming environment with a software stack optimized for gaming; and yet another could run Media Server to serve up video content over a home network.

  A fourth scenario is the segregation of work and home applications. Let's face it… even though most IT shops mandate that laptops are for business use only, the reality is that they are used for work and personal efforts. I have yet to run into a business traveler carrying two laptops—one for personal use and one for business use—to comply with their IT policies. Now imagine: as a mobile user with virtualization, you could maintain a home virtual machine and a work virtual machine on the same laptop. This certainly better segregates usage and is a more realistic approach to IT policies for our ever-increasing road warrior population. One other client opportunity is having a dedicated virtual machine to help with diagnostic or support services on a system.

  David points out how valuable this concept could be when, say, migrating to a new computer where you would merely create a new VM for your new OS/applications and maintain a VM of your legacy OS/applications.

  Returning to the scenario of a single application per virtual machine… what if you could purchase these preconfigured “personalities”—customized VMs—that plug into your virtualized client system. There is a clear opportunity here for the industry to seed the market with a variety of purpose-built VMs. I think this vision around virtualization is key to driving Linux adoption on the client. In fact, I challenged the Linux community in my April keynote to seed the market. In this new world, we will find Linux co-existing next to Microsoft on the same platform.

  VMWare has already done work here on their Virtual Machine Technology Network (VMTN) where people have posted prepackaged VMs for general consumption. This is an early indication of where I think that things could move. However, software licensing will probably be the gating issue for these prepackaged VMs.

  One of the biggest values of virtualization is the fact that it abstracts the operating environment from underlying platform. However, for this to be effective, we need some industry standards that minimize the associated snags. Watch this space… : )
  

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• Rampant Speculation on the XPS 700

  Thu. Aug. 24, 2006
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Several of you have been asking specifically about the NVIDIA 590 chipset and the XPS 700. Other recent forums entries like Tom’s Hardware and CNET contain some misinformation that needs to be cleared up.

  What’s driving some of this speculation? For starters, our chipset had been identified incorrectly by two different utilities available to the public, nTune and CPU-Z. These screenshots from a Dell Community Forum user show what I'm talking about. Bottom line, we’ve fixed the error with NVIDIA and we’re working with NVIDIA to ensure future applications identify the chipset correctly. Regarding third-party utilities such as CPU-Z, we’re looking into why these applications are misreporting the chipset. Also, contributing to this speculation is that a Dell rep allegedly gave customers erroneous information about the chipset. I wasn’t able to verify that actually happened. If it did, the information shared is incorrect.

  Here’s the deal: the XPS 700 utilizes the NVIDIA 590 chipset. The reports about it being a hybrid version are all wrong, period. One of the main performance enhancements of the 590 chipset is that it offers two full-bandwidth, 16-lane PCI Express links to ensure maximum graphics performance. The XPS 700 fully supports this. Is it our own implementation? Yes. What does that mean? Just like NVIDIA’s Brian Del Rizzo said in the Tom’s Hardware post, we chose not to support some of the core features NVIDIA built into the media and communications “southbridge” controller. Why? To ensure standardization across our product line, we replaced NVIDIA’s DualNet and FirstPacket communications technologies (two features of the on-chip networking solution on the chipset) with the networking solution that we use on all our products to ensure better compatibility across different product families. Another example, we chose not to implement NVIDIA’s SLI-Ready Memory feature because Extended SPD supported memory was not available when XPS 700 was in development as it is proprietary and not yet an industry standard. See NVIDIA’s nForce 590 product page for more explanation of these features and more

  For folks that are concerned about future upgradeability, note that the XPS 700 is the first system we’ve introduced that was designed to support an industry-standard BTX system board down the road. This means if you want to swap out the system board down the road, to accommodate future technology, you can. Some custom cables are required for certain connections.

  Several of you are also asking how the SoundBlaster X-Fi card that we sell differs from the retail version. From a hardware perspective, it doesn’t. Speculation around this varies: that we don’t offer hardware support for Dolby Digital, that we only support it via software, or that we don’t support it at all. The real answer: we do support Dolby 5.1, we don’t support DTS.

  Why don’t we use the Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi’s retail software package for Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS? Because of compatibility issues between Creative’s retail package and Sonic’s playback software. Dell supports Dolby Digital 5.1 playback through Sonic CinePlayer. This means that customers with an appropriate speaker setup and the X-Fi card can listen to a Dolby Digital 5.1 source automatically. Dolby Digital 5.1 does not need hardware acceleration features enabled by the Sound Blaster X-Fi. Hardware acceleration for games that enable EAX, CMSS-3D, and 24-bit Crystalizer are all supported, just as they are with the retail card. DTS is not currently supported by the Sonic CinePlayer.

  On that same CNET post, there was a question about our XPS Support queue. Can’t speak to the issue directly since it doesn’t share many details, but I can say that the XPS Support phone queue is available 24/7. Customers who purchase three or four year at-home service contracts with their systems can opt for night and weekend on-site support. See this link for more details.

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• Apple’s Notebook Battery Recall

  Thu. Aug. 24, 2006
  by Alex Gruzen, Sr. VP—Consumer Product Group
  Many of you have probably already seen that Apple announced a battery recall for some of its notebook batteries. I wanted to take a moment to commend Apple for taking this action to protect customers.

  Our recall is proceeding well, based on the positive feedback we’re receiving from our customers worldwide. In the midst of all the media attention on this topic, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the facts. Our recall represents just over 15% of the 24.9 million batteries we shipped over a more than two-year period. If you consider that notebooks purchased before April 2004 are still clearly in use, then the fraction of our customers impacted by this recall gets even smaller. There were six confirmed incidents in the U.S. that helped us determine the root causes and scope of the recall. The small number of incidents reflects the reality that lithium-ion battery technology is safe and reliable; where we saw even the slightest risk to our customers, we took this proactive action to ensure their confidence in our products.

  The Dell team remains focused on getting updated batteries into the hands of affected customers as quickly as we can. The first replacements shipped within the first full day of our recall and the shipments continue to ramp up dramatically. Thank you for your support and patience as we work through this challenge. I hope we’ve earned your trust.

  You can expect further battery-related posts from Lionel and others on the Direct2Dell team. Keep the feedback coming.

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• PC Magazine Reader Satisfaction Survey

  Tue. Aug. 22, 2006
  by Laura Bosworth, Director - WW Customer Experience

  This morning, PC Magazine posted the results of their annual Reader Satisfaction survey.  Last week's ACSI results showed that we are making improvements; PC Magazine's results show that while our customers still have high brand loyalty towards Dell, our tech support and repair satisfaction ratings have plenty of room for improvement. Our numbers in those categories from last year to this year were basically unchanged. We are disappointed in that, and very disappointed that we did not receive a Readers' Choice award for the first time in years. At the same time, many of the investments and improvements we've made were after this survey went to print; we will continue working even harder and look for improvement in next year’s survey.

  In last week's Q2 earnings release, we committed an incremental amount of $50 million to a total of $150 million for the fiscal year to accelerate customer experience initiatives throughout the organization.  We want you to know that we are making investments—both in dollars and personally by thousands of employees who are working tirelessly—to address the issues highlighted in this survey. We believe that our investments will pay off. We continue to chug along with the changes to make things better—some of them will take longer than we like but they are coming. We thank everyone who has bought from us before and who is helping us to get better by providing feedback to us on where we can improve.

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• Correction: Letter O vs. Number 0 for Battery Recall

  Fri. Aug. 18, 2006
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Need to correct earlier statements I made on this blog regarding entering your battery serial number (PPID) on the battery recall site. My sincere apologies for the misinformation.

  Here’s what I can say:

  • The first 15 characters your PPID only contains zeros.

  • The last 5 characters may contain the number 0 (zero) or the letter O.

  • Since the last 5 characters can contain both a 0 (zero) and/or a letter O, please be careful when you are entering your battery serial number.

  Some Direct2Dell readers have asked whether the system identifies invalid numbers.  The answer is no.  Will aim to provide more clarification on this early next week, but wanted to get this correction out after I could confirm the above details.

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• XPS 700 + Conroe Now Shipping

  Fri. Aug. 18, 2006
  by Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger

  Lots of you are asking about the status of XPS 700.  Thanks for your patience.

  Since last week, we continue to ship more XPS 700 units with Pentium D processors.  Today, we have begun shipping Core 2 Duo-based XPS 700 units to customers. We’re currently shipping these machines in the U.S., Europe, Canada and Mexico. We expect to begin shipping in Australia and Japan soon. Know there's other questons... more updates to come next week.

  Update: We do have a considerable backlog to work through for all units, especially the Core 2 ones.  Current lead times still apply.  Please be patient—we're working to ship units as quickly as we can.

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