Dell profits dive 48% in Q4

Dell's coffers took a serious licking during its fiscal fourth quarter, courtesy your friendly neighborhood massive global recession. The Round Rock PC maker said its net profits fell 48 per cent between October and January, compared to the same period last year. It managed to put $351m in its pockets during the quarter, down …

[Vince]

Perhaps Dell will get the clue one day...

Dells profits are down because they're totally stupid. Here's my example...

3 Months ago I ordered a Dell Precision Laptop. Total Cost £3,800. Not your average laptop, and clearly very profitable for Dell - given the warranties etc added to it that I paid for.

My laptop was faulty, and had a Hard Disc fault. It also appeared to have other issues with stability - from factory before I'd installed things. Dell said it was just the Disc. Not great, but one of those things. No problem so far. They sent someone out who should install the new disc and then restore the laptop to the factory shipped condition for me (it was specifically noted for them to do it and I had the top support level which allows this). My laptop was given back with half my on-board equipment not working (no working GPS, Bluetooth, wrong video driver etc), and some drivers installed for equipment I didn't have.

I complained - what I was supposed to get was my original laptop shipped state back (inc various applications such as "Dell controlpoint") which I needed for features like the built in 3G card to work. No worries, they said. Another engineer, replaced a now perfectly fine hard disc again anyway, and my motherboard (no idea why).

Guess what, I had a different random collection of devices not working and applications that it ships with missing.

More complaints and Dell eventually decided the easiest thing to do is just ship me my laptop again from scratch, so I def have a factory shipped, new laptop.

Roll forward 3 months.

Despite numerous promises, 12 different people at Dell being involved (each saying they were taking personal ownership of the issue) and 3 laptops supposedly "sent for build" my "order" kept getting stuck, and they haven't yet shipped me a laptop.

This week I finally had enough and asked them to sort it and fast, or I'd take further action as I had, in writing my original conditions upon buying this laptop from them, and they'd clearly breached that understanding. Dell have decided it would be quicker to refund nearly £4,000 to me than simply ship me a working laptop. This despite that I've already warned them this means I'll blacklist them and I'll never spend another penny with them either directly or via recommendation etc.

So 3 months in Dell will get back a faulty laptop, refund me my money and lose all future sales.

I guess that's why the muppets are losing sales and profit. Kudos to HP, my replacement from them has turned up, works fine, everything installed and operating as it should, and unlike Dell they have proper recovery media so everything actually recovers and can be reinstalled properly if you ever need to.

Paris, cause she knows to give good service and get the job done rather than refund.

[Ian]

It's funny

It's funny because Dell is probably the most prominent company when financial times were strong to cut costs (i.e. decent customer support) to improve profits.

The result was to go from one of the best customer focussed companies to one of the worst in the whole IT industry. Their outsourcing turned them around from having extremely high quality kit with some of the best tech. support around to cheap, tacky, commonly failing hardware with the worst tech. support on the planet.

So whilst they cut costs to improve profits, they also lost much profit as customers dissapeared in droves.

So I might ask, now Dell has killed off a massive portion of it's customer base, and now it's already cut it's costs by rediculous amounts in a rage of greed over common sense, quite how the fuck does it intend to cut it's costs more now that financial times are bad? It's not like it can outsource or anything is it, it's not like it can lower hardware quality.

Dell is fucked, and as a customer who purchased just before they went shit and got shafted having to deal with them at work after they'd gone shit I have to lol quite hard that they've got what's long been coming to them.

[Dave]

Bloody Dell @$#$%!!!!

In the last year I've spent at least 7000CAD with Dell. This covered an XPS M1530 laptop (in the UK), 3 2408FPW monitors, 2 Studio Desktops and 2 MS Desktop 7000s (in Canada). You'd think that, that would mean something... you'd be wrong. Means absolutely f*** all!!

One of the desktop sets was DoA. It would not sync at all. The other was fine, no issues. Trying to arrange a warranty replacement almost impossible. 3 phone calls, over 3 hours on hold, one call routed to Business Printers department in the US when I called the Canadian number (WTF???) and then some t**t trying to tell me I had to hang up and call *YET ANOTHER F***ING NUMBER* because I mentioned that I had tried the keyboard on *gasp shock horror* an XPS system and the keyboard not working had to be addressed by that department (another WTF??). I only tried the damn keyboard on the XPS to make sure it was not the USB ports on the PC!! Arrrrgh! Finally got it sorted and replaced, but that wasn't the end of it.

I mis-ordered the monitors on the Studio PCs. So I arranged (quite easily to be fair) to return the monitors and re-ordered the 2408s. So far so good. They paid for the shipping and pick-up etc etc. How long to get the refund? Go on, how long do you think? 10 days? 20 days? 30 days? No... 2.5 F**KING MONTHS! That's how long!! F**King t**ts even LOST the damn returned monitors!!! I had to refer the matter to the Better Business Bureau because Dell were not dealing with it and ignoring the dam UPS shipping labels saying that the items HAD been signed for!! If it was only a few $$s fine, but this was nearly a grand!

I have absolutely no sympathy for Dells position at all. With completely f***ing useless service like that, I for one will NOT be using them again. It's a shame as the PCs themselves and the monitors are great (though I question the wisdom of any company using a piss poor 350W PSU with an 18A 12V rail with an 8GB quad core system, but I digress...). Just the level of after-sales service is appalling; never EVER buy any kind of extended warranty from them - its not worth it!

Contrast that to my dealings with TigerDirect where I ordered a ReadyNAS just after lunch and 2 days later had the thing in my hot, sweaty hands. I emailed them to say "Holy s**t well done!" and got not only an email back from their customer service saying "thanks!" but ALSO a call from their customer relations / business people to again reiterate their thanks. Now I dont expect that everyday, but from a company like Dell I expect substantially more than I have had.

Ok, now I feel better - sorry people had to rant :)

[MikeWW]

Home = appalling; Work = too inconsistent

In January 2008 I had endless problems with the home division which left me incandescent with rage. Being told at one point by Customer Services (an oxymoron!) that I had "been misled" just made things worse. Fortunately my account manager at work was brilliant and sorted it out for me, despite it being nothing to do with her and actually taking her several calls to resolve

She was then promoted and her replacement has caused so many problems that we actually complained to the team leader and asked for a different account manager.

Calls to Tech Support at work are equally inconsistent, some faults being resolved extremely quickly whilst others take weeks.

In summary: not surprised at all

[Daniel]

Re: It's funny

"Their outsourcing turned them around from having extremely high quality kit with some of the best tech. support around..."

Ahem.

Sorry, Dell have had a reputation for many good things (vastly cheaper than the competition, fast service, delivering exactly what you asked for instead of 'optional' extras which you neither want nor need), but they have NEVER had a reputation for extremely high quality kit.

Have you ever actually used a Dell laptop, or desktop for that matter? Cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap and more cheap. I've no experience with their x86 servers so can't comment on those.

Having said that (and just to turn your original statement on it's head), I have it on good authority that some of the newer Dell systems, the Mini 9 for example, are actually made very well. I haven't owned a Dell for about 10 years now, but several friends of mine do own one and in the last couple of years Dell seem to have realised that simply being the cheapest will not make them successful, and have started to invest in a bit of quality. This is a GOOD THING for Dell, and for the industry as a whole. Customers want good value, which is not the same as cheap.

Disclaimer: I work for a competitor to Dell, and whilst we of course want to win in the marketplace, it was painful to see Dell stagger through the last few years with no gameplan, a dwindling customer base and shoddy marketing. Much like IBM in the early 90s, and I genuinely hope they learn and recover like IBM did.