Learning from the Past

re: Learning from the Past

Bob — Sun, 19 Nov 2006 18:39:10 GMT

Lionel: Thanks for considering my suggestion!

re: Learning from the Past

Sean — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 03:13:19 GMT

What I would like to see if Dell expand their business accounts to be more friendly for small businesses. I would like to see an Employee Purchase Program for Small Businesses instead of it being limited to companies with over 150 employees.

My company uses Apple, Windows, and *nix machines and we have an EPP with Apple through our Apple Business account and our employees would like to see a similar program through Dell, but our account rep was not able to offer it since we only have 35 employees.

re: Learning from the Past

Bob — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 23:03:17 GMT

First of all I’d like to say that I really appreciate the fact that Dell is selling Open-Source friendly desktops on which buyers can install whichever Linux distro they like. However, these systems still come with a proprietary and sometimes buggy BIOS.

The good news is that there are desktop motherboards on the market that support LinuxBIOS – this is Free/Open Source and has a vibrant community that is dedicated to fixing any bugs that are found. LinuxBIOS is also stable and fast enough to be included by default on millions of $100 Laptops given to children all over the world.

The computer motherboard manufacturer MSI is currently porting the K9 Neo motherboard to LinuxBIOS. This desktop motherboard supports AMD Athlon 64 X2, Athlon 64 and Sempron processors.

Here's the latest correspondence between MSI engineers and LinuxBIOS developers:
http://www.openbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2006-November/016901.html

AMD has also recently offered to port LinuxBIOS to popular desktop motherboards:

http://www.openbios.org/pipermail/linuxbios/2006-November/016632.html

It would be great if Dell’s Open Source desktops contained a motherboard that supports LinuxBIOS.

re: Learning from the Past

Joe Customer — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 00:49:25 GMT

But what you are really doing is simply going after the most vocal people and giving them special attention above and beyond what joe customer gets. What you need to do is fix the everyday joe customer experience, and make it as good as what you are throwing at the jarvis types. Nobody is being fooled by this tactic.