March 2008 - Direct2Dell

This month, Dell launches its new "Partners Wanted" advertising campaign. HP partners got a sneak peek at the ad campaign at the HP Americas Partner Conference in Las Vegas this past week, where we distributed samples of the Dell ad to approximately 800 HP partners attending the conference.  Only the highly-efficient and professional Caesar's Palace security staff prevented our team from reaching all 1,100 HP partners in attendance.

Based on the feedback from our partners, we know that features such as Deal Registration, pricing, certification paths, EqualLogic storage and no messy rebates are what has brought us tens of thousands of channel partners to-date.  We expect those same PartnerDirect features may appeal to HP partners who got the message in Las Vegas last week.

This is playing to win and we will continue to find innovative ways to go on the offense.  We're interested in any ideas you may have.  Send them on!

Sometimes we have to react to information that has no basis in reality. That's what we're dealing with here.

A recent analyst document from Avian Securities incorrectly stated that Dell is seeing high return rates (20 - 30%) due to performance issues and failures on solid state disk drives (SSDs). It has been the basis of conversations in the blogosphere like Crave, Gizmodo, Techcrunch and BloggingStocks.

Here's the real story: the 20 - 30% failure and return rates cited by Avian Securities don't even vaguely resemble what's happening in our business. It's also true that Avian did not contact us while doing their research. Said another way, it's just not true.

Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we've shipped. Beyond that, return rates for SSDs are in line with our expectations for new technology and an order of magnitude better than rates reported in the press.

The vast majority of our customers who purchased these drives appreciate the benefits that SSD drives offer: increased durability, fast start up, better reliability and improved access times.

In her earlier blog post, Sarah Williams from our product group mentioned that first-generation SSD drives performed on par with 5400RPM laptop hard drives overall. She also said that we're now offering second-generation Samsung's SATA II drives (we call them Dell Flash Ultra Performance SSD) that outperform existing laptop (and even some fast desktop) hard drives. 

Whether we're talking about a new technology or an established one, Dell is extremely strict on quality variations. Hard drive quality in particular is closely monitored by virtue of its job: to store customer data. Computers can be easily replaced—customer data cannot.

We remain committed to SSD technology and see it as a key technology that will advance mobile computing overall. Because of this, we will continue our efforts to offer them across a variety of consumer and business laptops and mobile workstations.

Update: EqualLogic blogger Marc Farley weighed in on the topic here. Very soon, he will be joining the Direct2Dell family to contribute to a new group blog we'll be launching soon called Inside IT. More details coming.

Earlier today, we began offering Ubuntu 7.10 on the Inspiron 530n desktop to customers in China. We did this because many Dell China customers have asked about it there.

Ubuntu 7.10 offers many new functions. such as DVD playback. Update from Lionel: My apologies, we are not supporting DVD playback in China.

In the time since we introduced Ubuntu 7.10 in the United States, the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Latin America and Canada, our engineers have been testing Ubuntu so we could offer it there. Dell China Ubuntu customers can call Dell for basic installation and configuration help. Canonical will provide one year tech support. Customers in China can get more details about the operating system at Canonical's Ubuntu website here.

Last year, we introduced Optiplex 330 and 755 preinstalled with SUSE Linux Desktop 10. This is another step in that process.

Those of you who have followed Dell's social media journey know that we started these efforts just about two years ago at this time when Michael Dell himself asked our team to find Dell customers in the blogosphere in need of support so we could provide it to them. We've grown a fair amount since then, and I thought this might be a good time to provide a framework for what's coming next.

Here are four main areas we will continue to focus on as a team. I'll be blogging about various aspects of each moving forward (along with other Dell bloggers) as we start to make inroads against them.

• More Conversations - This is really about expansion, and you can expect it in two ways: more languages and more group blogs. Focusing on Direct2Dell, many of you already know that we have a few Dell blogs in Chinese, Spanish and Norwegian. There will be more languages coming soon—with Japanese most likely coming next. The other type of expansion is with group blogs. You may already be familiar with the Dell Shares Investor Relations group blog and the Cloud Computing group blog we just launched a couple of weeks ago. By the end of this week, we hope to roll out Inside IT, which will be a group blog about all hardware and software for businesses and corporations—everything from laptops to servers and storage, services, systems management and more. Several other group blogs already lined up after that.

• Ease of Use - This also applies to things on a couple of fronts. First off, we need to make our social media tools easier to navigate and use. Part of the way we hope to get there is to drive more consistency across our social media properties—we're working on that now. The second part: we need make it easier for you to find information you're looking for. Consistency will help, but this really requires innovative thinking. An example is something we've recently introduced on the Dell Community Forum called Accepted Solutions. I'm pumped because it empowers our customers to show other Forum readers what response fixed their issue in a way that's pretty easy to spot. More on that coming soon.

• Collaboration - This is bigger than the blog. It encompasses all of our social media properties and then some. Over the past two years, we've built some listening posts that open up lines of communication between Dell and our customers. Many times, we get feedback from customers via monitoring conversations in the blogosphere, on Direct2Dell, the Dell Community Forum or IdeaStorm before they show up in our call centers. But a pipeline for customer feedback is useless if we don't act on that information. Internal collaboration is vital to our long-term success. Without it, we simply won't be able to keep up with the volume of feedback we receive through social media every day. Most importantly though, doing it right will mean a quicker response from Dell to customers whether you're trying to fix a technical issue, or waiting for us to implement a great idea that you have shared through IdeaStorm. There's a lot to this topic... for a bit more background, take a look at Shel Israel's recent post about social software in the enterprise, which was prompted by a software-related post from Dennis Howlett.

• Community Meets e-Commerce - In my view, all of our efforts in the social media space should empower our customers. Speaking of Dell.com specifically, it's clear that we need to do a better job of giving customers a chance to influence content on the website. I think Jeremiah Owyang's concept of the Irrelevant Corporate website is right on target here. In the past, much of Dell.com focused on mainly on e-commerce activities, while community tools resided in an isolated part of the website. In my view, there should be much tighter integration between community and e-commerce. We've taken some small steps in this direction like introducing ratings and reviews functionality in many countries. More on that in the near future.

Starting today, we're offering customers in the United States, Canada and Europe the Inspiron 1525 equipped with an optional Blu-ray drive under $1000. In the United States, that starting price is $879—specific pricing may vary in other regions.

The Inspiron 1525 laptop is the one that Laptop Magazine gave their Editors' Choice award to. It features a 15.4-inch 1280 x 800 resolution (or optional 1440 x 900) wide aspect display means it support up to 720p resolution. It also includes an HDMI port so you can connect it to a larger external display or HDTV.

If you're not familiar with Blu-ray, here's a blog post from Brian Zucker about that explains it in more detail. Back in mid-February, the blogosphere reacted to a Reuters story that said Toshiba planned to exit HD-DVD, the competing high-definition disc format. A few days later, they made it official. Since then, many new releases are coming out in the Blu-ray format, and places like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Blockbuster and Netflix are actively promoting Blu-ray titles.