re: Dell Consumer Hosted First Retail Partner Summit

Kevin_Lei_Li — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 05:26:58 GMT

Hi Dell, I am not a Dell Employee but I love Dell as much as your employees. I heard something happening in Dell China Design Center, and it is really hard to understand: you are cutting several test teams and have established a new team called “Solution Architect Team”. 1. The perspective of their functions From the perspective of their respective functions, a test team can guarantee the product quality by detecting the product defects before the product is released to end-users. After the test teams are cut or downsized, testing resources will become tight in Dell, and apparently the quality of new products will drop. Now in PC Market, comparing with other competitors like HP and IBM, Dell has no advantage in product quality. Then will it even become worse in future? If so, as a Dell user like me, I will hesitate to purchase any more Dell products. The worse the quality of Dell Products is, the less Dell profits will be, and as a result, Dell may have to downsize again in future. This will start a malign cycle. As to the “Solution Architect Team”, most solutions are based on Microsoft Software. Then in software part, can it compete with Microsoft Solution Team when Microsoft owns the core technology of Microsoft products? If I purchase Dell Solutions, can Dell knowledge about Microsoft Products be strong enough to timely resolve technical issues, which may suddenly burst out to stop my business operations in future? If not, as a customer, why don’t I purchase solutions directly from Microsoft instead? Furthermore, if I choose Microsoft solutions, I will have more flexibility in selecting the hardware infrastructure from so many vendors like IBM and HP etc. In a summary, test teams are something necessary for Dell if Dell wants to implement its commitment to users about product quality, while the “Solution Architect Team” looks to be a kind of redundance. 2. The cost As I know, the salary of an engineer in the “Solution Architect Team” is triple even quadruple the salary of a test engineer. So if you cut the “Solution Architect Team” instead, you may retain several test teams to guarantee the quality of Dell products. Why are you planning to retain a redundant team and cut several test teams to take the risk of failing to meet your commitments about product quality to end-users? How will you explain this strategy to Dell shareholders and investors if the product quality sharply drops one year later?