I have been an unabashed fan of Dell for over twenty years. I have believed in the company’s business model since first hearing about Michael Dell’s vision. I have preached in big corporations, small business offices, and individual homes the merits of purchasing this company’s equipment above any competitors for many, many, years. Sadly, in the past several months I have heard and personally experienced events which lead me to conclude this company is shifting directions, leaving some of its staunchest supporters behind.....
Perhaps the first warning sign came last summer. A client with an admitted propensity for ignoring issues until they become “critical,” called early one morning. Many of you know the story already.
“Nobody can get their email. We can’t even get on the web and we have an even bigger problem!” Remaining calm, I purposely paused a few seconds before responding hoping my agitated client might catch his breath. “Besides not having email and web surfing, what else is going on?”
“We can’t pull up our case information and we have several briefs due and a big case going to court at the end of the week!” At this point, I could envision a small but decidedly angry group of staff peering down at the telephone over my client’s shoulder. Before I had time to ask a few questions to diagnose the severity of the issues, the final “confession” was breathed into the receiver, “I’ve already looked at the server. The screen was black and I tried turning it back on. I heard a ‘whining sound’ followed by some clicks. Nothing came up on the screen, not even an error message.”
I had warned this client that his aging Windows NT 4.0 Server was experiencing read/write issues on both RAID Volumes for nearly a year. The Event Viewer would show that certain disk stripes were unreadable during periodic system reboots. While the system continued to perform, unmistakable warning signs of impending hardware failure were being broadcast to anyone willing to listen. I listened, but despite my begging, pleading, and cajoling, my client insisted on waiting for the shoe to literally drop.
Compounding the challenge now facing them, and by extension me, was lax (putting it kindly) follow through keeping the tape backup system properly rotated and running. One obvious moral to this story is, backup, backup, backup. This task is without doubt the most difficult to get commitment on in small business settings (and I won’t even discuss SOHO and individual settings because the problem is worse). Backing up isn’t “sexy,” it isn’t “fun,” and it doesn’t seem to add any productive “value” to the enterprise (until it is needed). Then good back ups are a value because productivity can come to an utter stand still!
You may be asking how this lengthy preamble relates to my perception that Dell is losing touch. Please read on for the rest of the story.....