When I graduated high school in 2002, as a graduation gift my dad got me a Dell Dimension tower for my upcoming college term. You best believe as soon as I unwrapped it and the Dell logo on the box was uncovered, my grandpa, always the comedian, shouted, "Dude, you just got a Dell!"
My Frankenstein computer is very old and made of many different computer parts. It has a cd/dvd rom, a Dell monitor, logitech speakers I believe. They are very small but can blast new videos better then older ones for some reason. The tower is a little newer but some of the USB ports require plug in adapter thingies. The cheap wireless mouse is the newest part. Got it for $12 bucks.
I feel bad for Dell. In 2010 they came out with a 5" phablet called Dell Streak. Nobody bought it and critics said it was too big. Fast forward to 2015 and now EVERYONE is using phones at or near 5", while people consider phablets to be 6" to 8"and they are also pretty popular. Dell was ahead of it's time.
wasn't it running windows phone 7? maybe that has something to do with it. it caused Dell to leave the phone market like when HP left the phone market in 2016 after the Elite X3 didn't sell well running windows 10 Mobile
No, It was running Android with will Dell interface on top. I remember the reviewers saying "you will look ridiculous with this thing near your face" and then in 2011 Samsung Note is introduced and becomes a big hit.
Just imagine being Michael Dell's roommate in college, watching him make $6 million in sales in his first year in college. He was probably like, "bruh."
I would have honestly taken that insider info and bought my tuitions worth in stocks or something. Or if they were cool I would have just asked for a Job
@@deandupont5503 LOL. You don't get rich by buying a lot of pizza for people just because you're making bank. MD likely had no friends in college that knew he was making that money. If he did, they would have been on him day and night to scrounge for sure.
It's just one anecdote, but when I recently ordered a Dell online, the sales rep emailed me a highly inaccurate transcript of our dialogue, the computer I received was defective, and the tech support person was shockingly ignorant. I had no choice but to return the computer and buy a different brand. Dude, I didn't get a Dell.
@@aurakille2148 I forget what the sales rep tried to sell me, though he was Indian and probably tried to sell me software and a warranty. I just distinctly remember that the supposed transcript of our conversation that he emailed me had nothing to do with what we actually discussed.
@@BungieStudios That was my first thought, even though the dialogue was about the precise model I was looking at. Whatever the case, I considered it just one of a string of errors/problems I experienced trying to buy from Dell.
Oh yeah, Gateway. Their fall was spectacular. I worked for them from 1995-1997 in tech support. Back then, they were growing and they were looking at trying to replace Dell in computer sales. Their fumbling definitely started with the release of the Wearnes 6x CDROM drive. There was some clown in the sales department that locked the company into a deal where we had to support that piece of shit no matter what. We weren't even allowed to admit we knew the drive was bad, and had to replace it with another Wearnes drive we knew wouldn't work. We had to make the customer open the case, reseat all the cables attached to the drive and only then were we allowed to replace it. Over 20 years later and I can still recall the part number for that damn drive. I had to write up so many replacements. We went through about 5 revisions of the failed Wearnes drive before we just replaced them all with 8x CDROM drives from Sony, but that was a long few months supporting that shit drive from Wearnes. Now, one bad part wouldn't kill a company, but Gateway then tried to get ISO9000 certification, and then you had internal sabotage start up. We lost some truly important trouble shooting tools in tech support that we needed to help customers because somebody claimed it wasn't ISO 9000 compliant. Employees that could read the handwriting on the wall resorted to hiding their resources to prevent some clown from confiscating them so we could do our jobs. Needless to say the quality of our tech support, the thing we were know for, started to take a serious hit. The third party contractors whom were hired at this time were not trained very well and further killed our numbers. By 1997, I quit and went back to college. People I knew stayed on for a while longer. Eventually, the idiots at the top tried to force tech support into becoming sales. They required each tech to sell upgrades or peripherals while fixing problems. Lack of sales would get experienced techs fired. Further killing the tech support quality.
I was a retail sales manager for Dell back in 2005-2006ish. The fact that when customers, and employees, had to call for support they had outrageous wait times and could barely understand the outsourced personnel definitely contributed to people's reluctance to buy Dell.
Robert your political correct comment "could barely understand the outsourced personnel" and this TH-cam "poor customer support" is so typical of every one now being more concerned about being racist than stating the facts. Which is DELL outsourcing to Indian IT service support centers where both accent and cultural forms of speaking was the problem. Such as "The problem being is the problem which I am understanding to your problem is being the problem which I will now ascertain the problem I now wish you describe your problem to me ". I know this because I once both trained for DELL and for Microsoft as a senior MCT and both companies in the desire to make more profit chose to employ Indians and and fly them in to England to be trained on DELL products. What I and several fellow contracted IT Trainers employed to bring them up to speed that most of them had been sent by Indian recruitment agencies in mainly Delphi most could not really speak English and openly boasted to each other the bribes they paid to get into DELL. Their accent and form of speaking made it hard for us Trainers to understand what they weer saying. We alos very quickly realize they had lied or supplied fake qualifications about their IT skills which were virtually zero. I had to stop one opening up a DELL because he wanted to sit some where else which was not near a electrical socket as he wanted to put batteries in it would work and he was poking about the circuit board with his hands and it was still live. It was a total farce and my self and eight other trainers all free-lancers ended our contracts because there was no made we were going to meet the Microsoft MCSE exams that DELL had set fro them to pass to become a DELL Service Technicians plus what we weer being paid for. The solution by DELL was to contact agencies in the UK and Indian and hire Indian IT Trainers and even though I cannot vouch as being true (which all the above is) apparently a special deal was done with Microsoft that qualification would be given not on the basis of passing the MCSE exams but attendance only. I went abroad for a few years and came back to the UK to retire, on needing a new PC I considered getting a DELL as for the price they were good PCs. I rung up DELL UK to find both sales and PC support weer all Indian based and have to say, it was atrocious and because I was spending so much time saying "Pardon" I gave up and went elsewhere.
@@wakeupuk3860 Me too. It was ridiculous. And this was as a Dell customer, buying a new one. I checked out HP customer service and they had English as first language people. I thanked them for knowing English.
they had a few really bad years around 2004. One thing not covered was their terrible BTX form factor that was incompatible with almost anything 3rd party, and ordinary looking power supplies with standard connectors but switched up pin-outs. Put a dell PSU from that era into another PC and you fry it, put a standard PSU in a dell and you fry it. All those round-ish grey on black machines were chock full of unreliable proprietary shit too The guy who replaced Michael Dell made a clownshow out of Dell
I remember working for Dell back in 2004 - 2007.. they started me at 33k / year for taking calls on the phone.. over the course of 2 yrs I was given some raises and bonus but they were small.. after a certain point they just stopped .. I worked for almost 2 yrs with no raise in pay and they would literally bring in people that used to work at McDonald's, put them in some 4 week fast paced training course, and then land them on the phones, I ended up training a good chunk of them because they had no idea how to troubleshoot or diagnose hardware problems. Anyone can read a script but walking a 70 yr old over the phone into reinstalling Windows XP or swapping out a hard drive you gotta be somewhat savvy with people.
Yup, I'm in house tech support at the company I work for, and the job is pretty easy, but communication skills and an understanding of what is going on is a must because a lot of the time I'm helping someone fix something who doesn't own a computer at home, and has no idea what they are doing. So you have to translate from geek to English, as I call it.
HP had to split, now it is HP for the client side (I wonder if they are throwing their shitty printers into their PC numbers), and they have HPE for datacenter sales, which is also crap as well.
Actually, HP is a lot worse than Dell. I had a Stream 14 that I had used for a year for some light video editing and a bit of web browsing. That white dog turd they called a computer was so bad, I ended up using a Dell and didn't have to deal with those issues after all of that.
I work for a company’s IT department and all we use is Dell. Laptops, desktops, servers, switches, you name it. Most of the time, they work very well. I’m using a Precision 7760 and it’s a pretty good computer. It has some small QC issues (space bar and shift key is squeaky) but beyond that it’s a solid piece of hardware. I’ve been impressed with them and I work with their stuff every day.
My sister does IT for a medium-ish sized company. When they do.mass upgrades she usually snags a free used desktop or laptop for me. They use Dell too and the desktops last forever. My previous one lasted for 5 years - plus however many years it had already been used. Zero complaints. Great workhorse machines.
I must be living in an alternate universe. I remember everyone in grad school having either a Dell XPS or a MacBook. HP a distant third. This was 2017-2020. Had no idea Dell was having issues...
no people hate dell because their computer systems are full of bloatware, their customer service is just THE WORST and have been proven to underperform in a lot of cases because of bad cooling solutions and blaotware. Many tech and non tech youtubers have been complaining about dell for years now.
@@LKonstantina915 huh. Didn't know that. Aside from an old ThinkPad, what's a better option these days? Also, wouldn't bloatware just be an OS problem?
@@sauerkrautjr ??? Dude, Do you know what bloatware is? Bloatware are independent pieces of software or utilities that are installed by the manufacturer of the PC. Windows as an OS is just a plain vanilla OS but manufacturers will add those “bonus utilities “ to make your life easier but many of them are unnecessary and they are called bloatware because they take space up in your hard drive and a bunch of them load with Windows taking up precious chunks of RAM. You can delete them all except for the ones that come directly from the manufacturer and even some of those are not necessary. With Windows evolution you hardly need any of them because there is driver support on Windows for almost everything. Smart phones come with them too including iPhones and Android. So the OS is a necessity by itself, everything els could be bloatware except your personally installed software.
I know that Dell is one of the biggest supporters of the "Right to Repair" movement. They use thumb screws on many desktops and some even have a side door lever! My daily driver is the Dell Optiplex 7010, and I love how modular it is.
I put together a Precision T7500 way back starting from an almost basic barebones case (it just had the mbd, PSU and the various cables), quite nicely put together overall, and runs with very low noise (atm it has two 4-core XEON X5570s, 32GB RAM, couple of 15K SAS disks and a Quadro of some kind). A friend told me though that the quality of their later workstation designs went down a lot,
There is a difference between being serviceable and right to repair, they still do not make schematics available to third party repair centers or customers for board level repairs, that said their precession and latitude line of laptops are tanks
@@jacksong6226That's true, though they are the only manufacturer that doesn't whitelist upgrades and provides publically available and detailed service manuals for every (decent) laptop that they make.
My parents bought a Dell back in like 2002/2003, and it was such an amazing computer compared to what we had before. I still have and occasionally use the monitor for it. We named it, "Dude, it's our Dell."
Robyn Highart they started switching primarily into supplying corporations instead of consumers, like ibm. So these days they mainly market to Fortune 500 companies and the like
Why didn't you include their huge push towards commercial computing? You also didn't mention Alienware. These are Dells biggest departments that still manufacture and service pcs
Because in the grand scheme of things they aren't really a computer sales company anymore. As much as you think they make money off selling Alienware computers, it's peanuts compared to their commercial services (ie datacenter support) side.
Wrong. There's only a few audience that uses PC as Gaming not worth mention, plus there are abundance of other makers as well as self-built enthusiasts.
@Mc Fireballs nailed it... I'm no fan of Dell but when you're basically relegating your desktop PC business (which is in decade long decline) to focus on upward market trends = decline?
@@Victor-fp2hn More like a meme before internet memes. Memes in general have existed long before the internet. Just think about that weird S symbol so many kids in multiple schools learned how to draw with seemingly no explanation as to where it came from.
Back in like 2010, I worked in Malaysia. We used Dell computers, and a new one was delivered missing one of the locking screws for the motherboard's VGA port. I called Dell, and they said they'll send a screw. Imagine my surprise when in 2 days time, a DELL EMPLOYEE showed up at our door, with a whole new motherboard. Not a screw. This guy had driven from 3 states away (2 hours), motherboard in hand, to replace the motherboard, because a screw was missing. Color me impressed.
The accounting scandal, which you "didn't want to talk about," was very important because it showed that the company wasn't doing nearly as well as it wanted Wall Street to think.
I loved Dell at first. I had 2 or 3 Dell's and loved them. Then I got a real lemon and dealing with barely english speaking tech's really soured me. I would never buy a dell again.
motherboard on mine went out in under 2 yrs... I got an hp and it breathes heavy like an old man.. I do have a Dell from like 2007 that still works... not great. But, a tank compared to Laptops of today. I've spilled beer on it, dropped it, ect. it still kinda does what's needed.
I used to work for a dell call center. Its an aweful company internally. All the non managers are outsourced, overworked, and when they cant squeeze more out of you they fire you. I know i sound salty for being let go but its shit pay for way too much work. i was refused an accomidation for my physical disability by the HR manager. By the time i was let go i was taking tier 1 and 2 cell phone calls, tier 1 and 2 computing calls and a internal section called LOBAS. Worked there for 1 and a half years and was in the top 10% of stats when they let me go.
I have a similar story. I bought my last Dell in 2002. It had an issue with the sound board. I called their tech deparment (of course someone named Jack from India) who said it was a software issue and it wasn't their problem. Funny thing is that all the software was what came with it. So I called the sales department. That guy gave me a phone number to a tech in the US. He ordered a new board and told me to keep his number.
They don't make em like they used to. I have an Optiplex that should be in a museum with fire damage throughout its chassis and water damage from putting out the fire. Still runs including the original hard drive. Meanwhile a skylake optiplex had its mainboard die within two years, then the power supply went out taking two memory modules with it.
Dell also took bribes from Intel around the 2003-2006 era not to use AMD processors (which were usually faster at that time). Nearly forcing AMD to bankruptcy and caused a wider stagnation effect in the rising performance of PC's as Intel's dominance led to lack of innovation which ironically contributed to a decline in PC sales later on.
Correct. Intel paid Dell $1 Billion per year not to use AMD (Athlon CPU's) at the time. The financial stress and failure of AMD's follow up 'Bulldozer' CPU's nearly sank AMD. They also purchased ATI (Nvidia's primary competitor) for too much money which also contributed to AMD's near bankruptcy. The European Trade Commission ordered Intel to pay Billions to AMD but by then the damage had been done. Thankfully AMD are back with the new Ryzen CPU. There is a fantastic channel on TH-cam that has done some good reporting on this. Check out 'AdoredTV'.
i think intel paid a few big oem's not just dell (maybe hp too), i don't remember exactly. but that was mainly in the enterpise sector, that's where the big bucks are. if it was only the comsumers, amd would have no problem staying alive. but in the long run, they all lost alot of customers.
Intel paid a few OEM's to not use AMD, they kind of had all the power there as enterprise buyers weren't interested in AMD at the time (mostly anyway) so it wasn't like Dell or any other large OEM could tell Intel to f off. Not that it was right, but Dell probably wouldn't exist anymore if they hadn't toed the line.
@badtz maru not exactly, intel paid the oems to not sell amd at all, even their own reserves. at the time, amd cpus were faster and cheaper than intel's, at least in multicore tasks and alot of customers were interested in amd's opterons. but no one could buy because none of the oem's were selling them. intel of corse paid them losses and profits. in a few years, the damage to amd was almost inreversible, if they didn't had the console market, they would have been out (the only reason to thank microsoft's greed).
I worked at a Dell desktop plant for a couple months back in the late 2000's. You got a lot of it right, but the other thing is that they were so much of a desktop computer company that thinking about them as anything other than a desktop company hurt them. The plant closed. I don't think they ever even thought of turning it into a place to build tablets or laptops.
Dude! Love your videos, Company Man! Here's an idea: You could start making follow-up videos. Your videos are very well researched but I'm sure every now and then you find some comments that inspire you to look at the topic from a different angle. Would be cool to get a bit of discussion format going on with some featured user comments, if that's your thing.
@@companyman114 follow ups on the popular vids would be sweet. Id do the popular ones or pick and choose. But I'd love them to. Keep up the killer content 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤙🤙🤙🤙
HP had to do something because their computers were old technology until they acquired Compaq. Compaq was the best computer on the market at their time. If HP had not purchased Compaq when they did, they would have ended like Gateway.
HP acquired Compaq for business desktops, laptops, and servers. HP got rid of the Compaq consumer division and laid off a lot of those people. After the merger, Compaq employees’ suspicions were confirmed. Intel was screwing Compaq on pricing for CPU’s and Chipsets. So, if you want to know why Compaq went downhill, Compaq upper management was letting Intel run Compaq and it only benefited Intel.
In my industry (DoD govt. contracting), Dell is still HUUUUUUUGE. Certainly, HP is their chief competition, but that's a story in itself. HP used to be a waaaay more awesome company. Their test equipment used to be THE BEST, and before they merged with Compaq, their customer service and product design was all TOP NOTCH. Today, consumer HP is frequently pretty weak. When I'm stuck doing physical stuff, I prefer working on Dell equipment to HP. It's better designed, it's more thought out to be serviceable. Dell just sorta bailed on the consumer market and focused more on the business side of things. Their servers and workstations continue to be fantastic.
HP kept the Compaq business desktops and Compaq servers (which were superior to HP's offerings) and dumped the Compaq consumer PC's. Most of the Compaq employees working in the consumer group were either laid off or absorbed by other groups in HP. If you noticed a weakness in HP consumer PC's, it probably had nothing to do with the Compaq merger. In my opinion, HP did the right thing since HP was much stronger in the consumer area than Compaq. HP spun off the test group to become Agilent. Again, that was a good move on HP's part.
I completely agree. Comparing consumer spec vs enterprise spec hardware, sales or market share among one or more competitors is like comparing apples to oranges. That's because they don't target the same market.
your correct , money is not in PC' s but rather enterprise offering and services , I have heard Dell being descriped as a logistical company rather than a tech company first , this is because of their 24x7 offerings with onsite repair is most countries in the world .. the other vendors just mimic this
My first computer was a Dell Dimension 4600 that I ordered in 2004. It was a great machine and I never had any problems with it. It could do just about anything I wanted with it at the time. It was such a good machine that I ordered a replacement six years later because the Dimension became obsolete. My second computer was a Dell Studio XPS 9100. When fully upgraded, it was a beast of a machine. What turned me off of Dell was their customer service. They outsourced it overseas and that's where their customer service went to crap. I liked that for a time, Dell had customer service representatives that could actually speak English, not half English speaking people located in India. They would probably still have me as a customer if they kept their customer service department here in the US where it belongs.
I was a Dell owner, fan, and IT professional in the early 2000's and watched the downfall first hand. For me it was when they outsourced all the customer service and went from having some of the best customer service to the absolute worst. It's about the same time up I upgraded my Laptop from the old high quality model to their cheaper lower quality gear and had to rely on the customer service that we no longer there. It totally burned me and I've watched as Dell tries to squeeze every drop of profit out of all their industry and it doesn't work because it alienates the customer.
@@godofthisshit Lol, I don't think whether you buy the story or not validates or invalidates the story. The truth is out there, all you have is the ability to persuade yourself and others to believe that your story of the truth, which you basically make no attempt at doing. Well, you open the question, so there's that.
@@catdogfishdogcats I just looked it up. He born to a stockbroker and a orthodontist and received government contracts. These self made stories 9/10 don't pan out.
My then girlfriend bought a Dell, turned it on, and it showed there was a virus on it already. She got on the phone and talked to a girl in INDIA with the worst unintelligible accent mispronouncing and syncopating the English language to the point that my girlfriend packed it up and shipped it back. 2 days later I bought her a Thinkpad and it functioned perfectly from day 1.
Great video - thank you. I feel something you didn't address (or if you did it wasn't detailed fully) was that Dell stopped, at some point, offering comprehensive configuration options on PC's and laptops. At one point very early I recall that HDD's processors OS, RAM, EVERYTHING was customisable. Not so now and not so for a long time now. That customisation stopped around 2010 or a bit earlier and it was the main reason I stopped buying DELL computers. A further thing that alienated me (hey - you didn't mention the Alienware computers either!) was the support centres AND the sales people - all in India or some such place. Communication difficulties became the order of the day for me. It took over half the phone call at times just to discern what the hell the Dell person was saying the accents were so broad and indecipherable. Anyway, I could have possibly persisted with that BUT the end of customisation on the web site when buying was the real show-stopper for me. To this day I don't know why they cut down on the options so much. The upside is I leaned how to build my own computers and whilst time consuming is much more satisfying. It used to be VERY convenient to buy a DELL though! Thanks again for a great story!
I quit buying off the shelf / special order PCs as well. Built my Computer like 6 years ago and it is still going strong doing everything I need it to. I still bought a HP laptop for the wife at Walmart for the wife to surf the web and do social media stuff on. It does what she needs. Plus, I don't feel like learning how to build laptops.
Yes Zakky, I know. However it is only a former shadow of itself and as I mentioned in my comment it is no longer "offering comprehensive configuration options" - it is only offering VERY basic choices.
My first new computer was a Dell desktop. My middle school and high school self put it through hell in back. Upgrading video card, Ram, tipping dvds to an ipod...questionable websites. Man, I miss that rig sometimes. I might buy a shell and make a nostalgia machine out of it.
I never bought a "branded" computer in my life, why? I suppose because no-brands are cheaper, and the components are the same, often even better, because they use retail parts, not cut-off underpowered OEM custom made versions.
@Walker Glover exactly, brand computers charge more for the same parts, and even if their oem versions are not cut-off, sometimes are diverse enough that the generic manufacturer's drivers don't work, so you're stuck with their drivers, wich get rarely (if ever) updated, and when a new OS comes out some components may not work anymore.
@Walker Glover we call(ed) them "assembled PCs", they have no name because they're put together in little PC stores by the store owner, my first 2 PCs were like that, then I started assembling myself. I said "called" because I don't know if these little stores still exist (they probably moved to e-bay).
About 20 years ago, my grade school class saw the dude you’re getting a dell guy on a field trip at an aquarium. We chased him down, and tried to get him to say the phrase. He ran away. Poor guy, he probably couldn’t go out anywhere in public lol
To add to your video, another reason why Dell probably did so well back then but not today was because how fast computers were changing back then compared to today. Back then, it didn't take very long for some new faster products to come out that had been significantly better than before. In today's world, you could really get away with running stuff around 6 years ago and not have too many issues. Right now I'm running a computer that's probably close to 9 years old (minus the video card, that's about 7 years old) and still play most games ok and do what I want. You'd have a really hard time doing that back when Dell was in it's heyday.
Very True. I am still using a Mac Pro early 2008, that's 10 yrs old. I have upgraded the hard drives and video card. But the core computer still runs great. Back in the day I would upgrade my computer every 2 years. Same goes with iPhone. The only reason I upgraded to the iPhone 8 from my iPhone 6 is that I accidently put the 6 through a washer cycle. Otherwise I will still be rocking the iPhone 6.
Firestorm2900 I bought consumer and business computers and peripherals beginning in 1980s. Best way to describe it was you were jumping off a moving train regarding technological performance.
I use a dell computer with pfsense installed and a wireless NIC instead of a shitty overpriced consumer wifi router. It has 10x the processing power, 10x the RAM, 10x the customization, 10x the extensibility and 10x the flexibility. I think it's more about the consumer market and people with little to no knowledge of computing at the same time wanting easy shit and are also willing to pay more for it. Maybe I'm just be cynical kek. Maybe not.
Company Man - you kinda addressed it, but it was a very light addressing of it.... I think it would have been more interesting to get more details about the EMC acquisition / VMware as those two company are more interesting that dells origin story.
No issues - I don't find the desktop business interesting - I don't think the manufactures do either - its very low profit. Alienware would have been interesting as a gaming platform. What's also probably more what I expected from your channel would be about the way Dell structured its deal to buy EMC/VMware, and how its going 'public' again. There is tons of what I expect is very interesting in that setup if you can get good information on it... But overall I enjoy your videos, just wanted you to know that too!
"From 2003 to 2005 Dell shipped 11.8 million PCs with a known defect but chose not to fully disclose the situation to all of its customers" (faulty capacitors). They lost the trust of the public, especially business users.
Oh, yes, i remember the capacitor plage... : ) At this time, i was Dell field technician for servers. I had changed lots of server motherboards with bad capacitors. All defective motherboards with chinese capacitors. All motherboards were returned to Dells factory for refurbishing with good capacitors. Hp also had the same capacitor problems.
@ Anton Eitsah The faulty capacitors was not the fault of DELL. The Capacitor plague as it became know as was the result of the theft form Rubicon, the formula for low ESR Capacitors using a water based Electrolyte. However the manufacturers who used the stolen formula were not aware that there were other 'Secret' ingredients in the formula, ingredients that were not included in the 'cloned capacitors' thus by this reason the capacitors (other than the genuine RUBICON manufacture) were flawed by design as a result of an incomplete formulated electrolyte. As it is common for any manufacturer to buy components at the lowest price, the 'less expensive' clones were used rather than the RUBICON brand. Such errors are common when cost of manufacture is more important than Quality (which obviously adds to the manufactured cost)
I have purchased many Dell laptops and desktops for personal use and business since 2005 or so and I have never had a bad one. I still have 3 old Dell desktops and 3 old laptops that still work well for what they are. I recently purchased a Dell Rugged laptop and it is pretty awesome as well.
I heard that Steve Jobs never did much market research because he wanted new ideas but he did have research done on Gateway specifically to figure our what /not/ to do with their stores
It was marijuana...he was accused of buying a bag of marijuana in 2003, so Dell terminated his role, and he was blacklisted from acting...today he can only find minor roles...
I never thought of Dell being #1. I still use Dell today (Alienware laptops) and I like how I am able to find used parts should something break on the computer. Many cheaper computers don't have a market for replacement parts and the whole PC is trash if anything breaks. For some reason, I see Apple Macbooks as a bigger threat to eat Dell's market share. I see lots of people using them (I'm talking teachers, college students, and even tech people) and they always look down on me for not "getting with the times". Apple is thought of as leading the way into the future with other brands catching up.
Apple has never really been a threat in that market. Apple currently sits at 7% market share while Dell holds 28.5% . Apple has never gotten more then 10% market share in the home PC market.
I loved gateway.... The early days of everyone rushing to get a home pc and they got attention with the cow box on the doorstep ads. I was sad when they went to crap.
Gateway purchased eMachines then Gateway was purchased by Acer who also purchased Packard Bell and then later decided to discontinue the eMachines brand and only use the Gateway brand as low end machines in north America and the Packard Bell brand for low end machines in anywhere but north America
The thing that was cool about Gateway was they tried to be their own box stores for a time, so you could get legitimate direct help with any problems. They seemed to come and go very quickly both in my town and in quality...
@@hiro_6015 I'm sure you're right! I bought from them once but haven't been back since. I can't exactly remember why, but I don't think I was that impressed with the quality of the product or how long it lasted.
Gateway's were solid machines. Also built with off the shelf components. I recommended them to clients. I think their decline began when they opened all those stores with all the accompanying overhead and problems. There was another company that did well selling computers by mail and went down the tubes after opening stores. Can't remember the name offhand.
I think Dell have been doing really well in the past couple of years. My current machine is a Dell and when I decide to upgrade I plan to buy another one because I am happy with quality they provide especially compared to HP and Asus for examples. I've been checking out their XPS series and with the 2020 update they have really upped their game. Dell no longer sells budget computers. They are focusing on premium business laptops as well as the gaming industry with their Alienware. And this is just the PC branch not to mention all the services they provide.
they bought alienware and then cheapened them. tech support for alienware used to be in america, they outsourced it. totally ruined it. i remember when dell bought them, they said "were going to still be alienware, dell just allows us to buy parts cheaper!" yea, it didnt last long. just build your own pc. you get better parts, cheaper, and arent held back by proprietary hardware. my main computer is going on 10 years, and with a graphics card upgrade is still playing current games. try that on a dell, or alienware. wont happen.
I have the xps 8930 tower and it was great until a year after I bought it, coincidentally that was also when my warranty ran out. It started to freeze and is now in repair, turns out the processor has some sort of problem? It's still not fixed. It might just be my bad luck though, because I generally like Dell!
I wish I could agree with you, but the experience I've had with them has been shocking. First I buy a laptop for $2300 via paypal, the next day they email to say they have a payment error which shouldn't happen. I call today to ask what happened, they tell me they got it only to charge both my paypal and my bank account! Effectively I've given them $4600 and have to wait until next week for them to figure out how to do a refund. Took 10+ calls, half of which didn't even go through because their answering machine sent me to a dead line and not the extension number for customer care. They're not malicious, but god they are hopeless.
@@Relatablename sorry but who uses PayPal in 2021? Their security is really bad and this has happened to me in the past with other business. Problem wasn't with Dell, it was PayPal where the issue lies. Also when buying a pc/laptop I never buy directly from the manufacturer, resellers tend to be more trustworthy here in the UK and Europe in general (if you know where to look).
@@Luyco I know it's been a year since you made your comment but just heads up if your based in Europe you are entitled to two years guarantee by law. If they want to give you only one, just mention the customer rights act and they will quickly deal with the issue.
I remember calling tech support for Dell back in 05 and I could not understand one person over the phone. Tech support was over in India. Nightmare call. They never fixed what I called for I fixed it myself. I will admit that old computer from 2001 still going strong even though it's outdated
I got a new alienware laptop and had internet issues and called them and I could not understand them for the life of me. It was ridiculous. Ended up just fixing the problem myself.
Try being an onsite tech for Dell and you end up speaking to them to just order parts while onsite to fix something and the shit they sent has nothing to do with the problem. The tech support for techs are the same people that customers talked to just to get me out there. They run the same script on Dell techs and its fucking crazy. I ended up quitting in three months.
What about the capacitors of death they had. I was swapping 5 to 15 dell motherboards a day and it was I believe the GX270, GX260 models. We were told that Dell took a big hit for that. A subcontractor in Taiwan over filled some capacitors and these were used on various motherboards. Apple and HP were hit a little, and Dell took a bigger hit.
This happened to us as well with our GX270 models. Dell called it a "proactive replacement" of the boards in these systems rather than recalling them to prevent another stock price collapse like they had with those laptop batteries catching fire. We stuck by them however and had great results with later models, especially the 7010 model. But the 7020 models were subpar and we ended up going with Intel NUCs after those.
@@williambaldwin9346 I agree but the manner in which Dell did not inform us of the known issue until after we called several systems into them for repair was unacceptable. They were fortunate that we elected to stay with then after that board replacement situation.
Dell had a problem with their motherboards on those 2 model. I was IT that normally spent 100's of millions per year in new roll outs. I worked IT since 1985 and I don"t now because of disease. I was certified by Dell and always liked Dell, but the capacitor problem did occur. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague DELL replace motherboards quickly and without question. "In 2005, Dell spent some US$420 million replacing motherboards outright and on the logistics of determining whether a system was in need of replacement" I was with Lockheed Martin at that time.
@@LazyRunner-rf3jc I don't think anyone was denying the capacitor problem. They were saying that it was a bad supply and it wasn't only Dell. Everything with electrolytic capacitors from the mostly off brand Chinese and noname Korean suppliers was affected. Dell just took a huge hit because the large market share they had. Those bad caps kept me from being homeless during 08-10. Flipping TV's from Craigslist was pretty good money for a while. Free or almost free TV a few dollars in parts and $200 profit.
I went for a work related trip to Austin in the early 2000s. On a spare afternoon, my co-worker and I drove up to the Dell campus a little ways north of Austin to just look around. There was 7 or 8 office buildings on the campus. It was rather remarkable to think that only about 15 years prior, this guy was selling PCs out of his college dorm room. (edit) I think I would disagree that Dell has "declined". Maybe they sell less consumer PCs, but in the government market, Dell, together with HP, are the king of vendors, and one of the biggest tech companies in the entire world. The title of this video "The Decline of Dell: what happened?" sounds like it's a company headed towards extinction, which isn't even remotely the case.
Great vid! You really should do Glock at some point. Some Austrian who had no history in firearms made what is now the most popular pistol in the US, probably the world. Lots of fun drama and intrigue too, including an attempt on Gaston Glock's life.
I love my alienware 13. It has actual cooling, it has specs that makes sense (e.g. not having a 1440p screen paired with a 1060), and it has a 4 hour battery life. When the motherboard got fried they sent somebody to my house to fix it which I now find all the more interesting knowing now that they were one of the first to pioneer this practice.
I own many dell laptops over the years. Old xps 13 m1330, Alienware and the new xps. They don't have the best engineering as my hp last longer out of warranty. Their consumer service is the only reason I bought Dell. Repairing it at home is the best thing ever and they do it in nearly all the country theyre in. However for corporate use I found HP and Lenovo is better as their service is faster.
sonickiller360 I had a similar experience with my alienware. I had a corrupted hard drive and they sent someone to replace it. Had a great experience with their customer service.
In the early 2000's when Dell was at its peak, 2 bad things happened. First their customer service could not keep up with demand and as a result it deteriorated. Secondly and surprisingly - Dell started to blacklist buyers who purchased too many PC's, customers who Dell felt was suspicious for whatever reason. Dell maintained separate consumer and business markets, providing excellent technical support to the business class and education market while letting consumer markets suffer. I suspect much of the falling from grace Dell ran into was the consumer market walking away and switching to tablets and other brands of PC. Plus they clearly had a Y2K peak rolling out solid performing systems that lasted the consumer market rather long (business market would have leased their computers and had a pre-set rotation that provided clean refurbs to the consumer market. I am typing this on a Dell that I bought at a bricks and mortar store, and it is nothing special.
Their customer service and tech support were being told what to do by college students who learned marketing but were put in charge over everything in the company of which they had no knowledge. The phone support you got had between 16 to 19 minutes from the moment you got on the phone to get you off it and if you got tech support, it would often take up to ten minutes to get the customer set up where they could open the computer and then nine minutes to do thirty minutes of examining what's wrong with the supervisor often hanging over their shoulder either pointing to the clock on their phone or tapping their watch. They had a hotline to send out a tech often for no other reason than they forgot to plug in their computer and couldn't get the power button to work. You would not believe the level of incompetence running that company by 2006 when I hired in but once you hired these people, they refused to learn anything because they were almost always way to arrogant, making mistakes all over the place, cheap as hell, and either over designing the computers when they had no idea what they were doing or telling the designers what to do which is when their computers truly became garbage with all the rest of us working for the company trying to tell them what was wrong but since these people were the ones we were telling... well, you can gather nothing was done about it. The turnover rate for employees was enormous and the stress was so bad from all the angry customers and having about 19 minutes to get them off the phone that people were literally falling out of their chairs and being carried to the hospital while angry customers were calling in ten to thirty times (I kid you not) for the same issue that wasn't resolved. That's what you get for hiring people who didn't know what they were doing, wouldn't listen and were too arrogant to learn because they were college graduates and knew everything when they might have known marketing but nothing about the actual product. I guess that actually started with the success of the Dude commercials but when Michael Dell left the whole thing began to collapse.
My very first laptop was a Dell inspiron that my dad brought me back in 2011. After 10 years it still runs fine. Out of all brands laptops I’ve seen, Dell has best in industry screen and their customer service is surprisingly good. And they’re back with their high end laptops in recent years, Dell is making a comeback
you forgot that during the 03 to 05 era, they really got nailed by the substandard capacitors that where used at the time. It caused a lot of motherboard failures and the clamshell cases caused overheating issues. I was an outsourced Dell onsite tech from 03 to 06. It was rough, the customer service was horrible.
yah my dell xps 17 still going strong and its 8 years old, my dad bought an hp laptop and the fans, the hdd, and the screen all encountered problems by the 3 year mark. Dell still goes hard, theres just too much competition nowadays for one company to have computers monopolized.
HP's past 2011 have actually been receiving better reviews and feedback than recent Dell PCs. The XPS line has some real widespread problems which are fairly evident in their reviews. Just go on Google Shopping and look at the star rating, it's crazy! Get out of the past. My Envy is 8 years old and is still being used heavily to this day.
I've owned a couple of Dell computers myself, one is an XPS 1810 and the other is an XPS 2720 AIO, both are still going, although both had engineer callouts during their warranty and I had to send the XPS 2720 off to Germany for a major repair (the screen failed) a couple of years after it ran out. The organisation I worked for bought various Dell desktop and laptop models, but moved to another manufacturers products as they were cheaper. I'm just hearing from others that the quality of the components and the build is not as good as it used to be. Other companies have caught up and overtaken in what they offer, hopefully Dell will improve and produce some real decent models in the future.
The reason Dell went south is that they started selling crap. The last (and I do mean LAST) 2 Dell laptops I bought were defective out of the box. Literally. I opened them, turned them on, and they failed. I spent hours and hours and hours on the phone with what they laughingly called "Customer Support, less than affectionately known as Dell Hell." They adamantly refused to replace the machines, but did eventually make required repairs. It certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. BTW, I'm typing this on my HP. Suck it, Dell.
+Jeep Man Dell offers are 30-day return policy, so you can return a Dell product for any reason within this time period. From a defective computer, not liking the build quality, purchasing another computer since you ordered the Dell, to just changing your mind about wanting a new computer, Dell will accept the computer back within 30 days. If you purchased a system from Dell and it did not work upon arrival, you could have just returned the computer. I am a tech consultant who often recommends Dell and there have been a few cases where the system was defective out of the box. In these cases, Dell always accepted the return. However, I usually have my clients purchase directly from Dell. If you purchased your Dell laptops from another retailer, such as Best Buy, Amazon, etc., then the return policy of the retailer would apply.
Both purchased directly from Dell, and they did, indeed, refuse to replace them. I could have returned it? The reason I ordered was that I needed a laptop. I didn't want to return it - I wanted a working laptop (that I paid for,) preferably without spending a week on the phone. Alas, it was not to be. BTW, the second laptop did eventually work, but it took Dell 2 tries to get it operating correctly.
Very similar to my experience. I used to buy Dell, but then my last 2 purchases resulted in a total of 6 repairs and returns. I have had no problems at all with any of my HP and Lenovo kit. They also changed to an offshore Indian sales force, who continue to irritate me to this day.
We buy latitudes in our corporate environment. I'd say half of the laptops complain about nor having a big enough power supply eventhough it is and is what is shipped with the laptop. Not impressed.
Could their less emphasis on R&D costed them in the long run? Sure, they sold products on the cheap, but when you’re not following trends or coming up with new innovations, you’re going to get stuck behind.
I'm in the IT business and I can tell you that Dell EMC is very much alive and active in the Enterprise server space. I'm reminded of this every time I run a service call in a Data Center.
This video is an accurate description of the company's decline when it comes to the personal computer, this, as the pc has become a commodity which makes it hard for anyone in the market to differentiate and make their margins. However, the firm is now focussing on solutions to support those same products that have become commodities, meaning that when you go a step further into infrastructure, networking, storage, data analytics and -security (just to name a few) chances are you'll still end up using one of DELL's products/services. This is all part of the Digital Transformation. Michael Dell knew this years ago and has been working towards solidifying the company's innovative technological position within the IT sector.
As an end user you couldn't upgrade the machine it became trash as the end of its life. Go over to Ebay and type Dell motherboard and you will see all the convoluted shapes they used. The key word here is ATX, Dell used non ATX which was the industry standard since the late 80's
I paid $800 for a Dell gaming laptop in 2017 after my Digital Storm desktop of seven years broke. Has been working well even as I'm typing this. But I understand the hate Dell gets. I would be hesitant too because they don't really have a great track record. I'm going to buy a new build, but likely won't choose Dell. I wish I could build my own, but I can't because of my physical disability.
Back in about 2010 when I had a Dell, I had to call customer service and it was appallingly poor. The highlight was, after repeating it very slowly several times, the rep refused to take my phone number (of the phone I was calling on) because "it didn't have enough digits." After dragging on for several weeks, I realised they simply did not have the capacity to provide any form of support, so when buying another computer I chose a company that did.
Sears Canada went bankrupt then finally closed the last stores about a year ago. Surprised they are not gone in the US after hemorrhaging money for nearly a decade.
I was in tech support right about when Dell lost it's top spot. I never owned a dell, most of my personal machines were hand built. The complaints that I heard from Dell owners was that the CS went down hill and fast. The complaints that I had were about people bringing in Dell towers and me wincing. Dell had a bad habit of using proprietary or at least non-standard parts. This is fine I suppose while you're in warranty, but not so fine once the warranty wears out and you have a part fail. Replacing a power supply is usually a quick, easy and cheap repair job, or it is when you're using a standard one. When it's a funky size to fit inside a weirdly shaped tower case, not so much. As a result, I became very hesitant to guarantee I could fix anything on dell computers. Other manufacturers did it occasionally, but not as often as dell did.
I just junked a Dell computer because of its proprietary parts. That's what happens when companies forget whet made them successful. With Dell it was straying from using standard components.
Never once seen the Dell commercial from the 90's. Back in 98 I repaired my first ever computer and ever since; I have built my own systems. Only owned two dell systems in my entire 25 year history of owning PC's. One was a donation from my high school for my school work at time time; and the other one was a second hand system that someone purchased for the CPU it had and put it up for sale on FB marketplace. If you count laptops in the mix I owned 3 Dell's. Their laptop models to me at least have a better aesthetic appeal then the desktop.
Haha! I'm so glad I stumbled across this! I used to work for Dell back in 2001-2004ish? At that time, the company was trying to get into the laptop market. It was rough. The Inspiron? I think it was the Inspiron, was supposed to be the flagship laptop. It...was okay. The screen had some weird filmy look to it, the cd drive was problematic...we had a lot of returns. It was an improvement over the prior models though. I was talking to one tech and he had one come in where a fuse had blown out next to the screen. I'm sure the customer was not happy about this. Had another one with bullet holes through it. Mind you, this was Austin, Texas. XD Needless to say, the customer was less than pleased with the performance of the laptop. I personally had one where the ticket said the reason for the return was "Act of God" XD Again, only in Texas would any laptop be returned and accepted for a reason like that! Haha! If you're curious, I was a motherboard tester. We had racks upon racks of mockups to test motherboards. I was mainly in the refurbishment area. At that time, I remember Michael Dell's strategy at that time was gaining market share which lines up nicely, timeline-wise, with what you stated in your video. I think he was trying to crack into the China market. I may be wrong though. We also were starting to focus heavily into servers. Mostly for businesses that needed scalability. The system was supposed to make it easy to grow as the companies that were using it grew. It was a pretty easy system. Need more servers? Just slide another in. Was pretty slick. Anyways, it was a nice trip down memory lane for me so, thank you very much! And yes, I remember the commercials. Everyone at work groaned and rolled our eyes, but for the most part, we liked it. =) Oh, if I'm not mistaken, the Dell dude was busted for buying weed. Didn't surprise anyone. In my opinion, it just fit his character. XD Not sure if that was the reason those commercials started to fade out.
I think you glossed over or completely missed a lot of the story. 1. HPs rise was fueled by enterprise. They controlled so much inventory especially in that enterprise space that they could easily undercut Dell. At the time many high volume low profit companies went belly up and those in enterprise needed to offer more than just computers and servers. They needed to offer support, deployment and even services or tools for management. Dell simply couldn't compete with HP 2. The rise of Apple and tablets further transformed the PC space. People wanted more quality due to the success of the Mac book and Mac book air. Further these devices became status symbols and Dell was always a poor mans toy. Smartphone and Tablets shrunk the PC market meaning high volume sales wouldn't work plus those devices didn't need a charger to survive more than 2hours 3. Buying the company back meant Dell could move away from high volume low profit to products with better margins. During that time they produced the XPS 13 and 15 ultrabooks which are arguably one of the best windows laptops out there. Shareholders would have prevented the company ever making that move.
Agreed, but we should also remember how that rise in enterprise came to be. The absolutely stunning/ruthless/amazing job HP did to cut Dell off from their enterprise sales generated via EDS. When EDS was still around they and Dell shared 2 or 3 board members. EDS used Dell internally and more importantly EDS recommended Dell Enterprise hardware in their consulting. HP wanted to force Dell out of the enterprise market and moved to do so by buying EDS. It was a double whammy, Dell lost not only EDS corporate business and their recommendations but now EDS used and recommended HP instead. I would imagine it would make a good business PHD thesis paper. Also, note this move was done by HP not only to cut Dell off but Cisco as well who were also benefiting from EDS enterprise networking recommendations.
I didn’t look up numbers but I see way more Dell PCs vs other brands. When I started working at my current company we had compaq PCs but 23 years later everything is Dell. We don’t even get HP computers. A few times we had equipment come with e-machines or other brands but our IT threw them out and hooked up Dell branded machines. At home I have several old dells but when I buy an off lease machine for myself or someone I get Lenovo or HP. I have not bought a brand new pc in 15 years. Now I just get an off lease and upgrade it. Saves $$$$
I was a Dell fanboy for years and still have and regularly use my XPS420 32 bit from 2007. It honestly needs replacing but if it ain't broke... BUT! It will not be replaced by another Dell. The customer service is abysmal and parts are so incredibly expensive.
Dell, for the most part, has always built a good system. I've used Dell for many years, and as on right now, I have 2 desktops, and 2 laptops. In fact, I'm typing this comment on a Dell Inspiron. While I totally agree that sales dipped with the advent of tablets and iPads, people are realizing, that in order to successfully edit videos and photos, the tablets aren't cutting it, and the desktop is making a resurgence. The biggest reason has to do with social media, like TH-cam. Everyone wants to be the next TH-cam star, and they realize, in order to stand out, they need to edit their videos. Smartphones and tablets just don't have the resources to handle it, and to get that kind of power on a laptop is very expensive, so welcome back desktop! That's my two cents... That, and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee at 7-11...😉
True but they are just as guilty as apple with built in expiration! The batteries as with most have timers that prevent them from working after so many charge/use cycles even if all the cells are still above 90% I have taken many Dell batteries apart to salvage the cells for flashlights and vape mods when tested them I found less than 1 in 50 that were not charging properly! They use good cells but force you to replace them way before they need to be! And you can’t just replace the rare bad cell because the little chip they put inside the batteries won’t let it power the laptops! Unless you have access to equipment to reset the counter! And there businesses laptops have a high failure rate on certain parts (something Apple is guilty of also) they start to fail when the warranty is up right after 3 years regardless if it’s used heavy or one. A week they all fail! I stopped buying Dell Precision laptops because of this! Don’t get me wrong when the wither are very durable and powerful but they aren’t the same as a custom built system ( I still have a I7 desktop I built in 2010 and it’s functioning just like new today) if it was a Dell it would have been dead years ago and a proprietary part that failed that’s no longer available!
you must have got a bad one! i have been using Dell for years and my only complaint is the Built In Self destruct Dell puts into there products! I don't Buy Their Business Products anymore because of this!
@JoybuzzahzTV they were locked into a demo mode for the store display! Bestbuy and even Walmart does this on systems that allow it to prevent people from messing them up! Someone that should not be in the settings can mess up a system real bad making their job very hard. This is not new in big box stores!!! Even Circuit City did it years ago.
Battery timers and counters ehe? Sounds funny, since one old Dell laptop I have is 8 years old, and the battery still works, and charges just fine. While the charge no longer lasts like it did when it was new, it still has a solid 2 hour run time. Chemtrails on the other hand...
Well you gotta hand it to Dell, he was actually living the dream, I mean how many people do we know today that drops out of college and succeeds even remotely like this?
What happened with Commodore was Jack Tramiel retired and an extremely left wing Professor from Berkely took it over whom taught his classes how evil capitalism is. So what he did was made the Commodore Plus 4 which had NO Peripherals or software. Stores were left with them they couldn't sell or return.
The quality of their hardware and customer service dipped so abruptly it was astounding. I was working for an all Dell company at the time and within 2 years we switched out every PC with an HP.
Dell started hiring people straight out of college for administrative jobs and even had to create a hotline just for them for simple issues like they forgot to plug in their computer and when they were pushing the power button it wouldn't turn on so we sent out techs and they almost always called us back laughing that these high paid geniuses didn't know the first thing about computers. Their designers were the same so you literally had people who didn't know the first thing about computers either designing them or telling the designers what to do. Do you remember the capacitor issue? They were buying the damn things in bulk for less than a cent each and thought they were saving a fortune but then all the calls started coming in and like you said, it started abruptly when they instituted new hiring practices to hire out of college and put them in administrative positions with no experience and often no knowledge of what they were doing as most were in college to learn marketing, not computers and Dell was putting them in charge over everything beginning with incentives then President Clinton helped to create to get employers to hire more college students out of college... by the time I hired on there were mistakes happening everywhere and then came the big capacitor fiasco they wouldn't listen to anyone about and like you said, almost immediately everything crashed abruptly. They just would not listen to anyone until Michael Dell took back over and fired a bunch of them but by then it was too late as all of their bad policies and arrogance had ruined the company's name and they lost a lot of business where no one will ever trust the Dell name again and any hint it's a Dell even in a different box and they will not buy it.
Absolutely right. I don't think they ever looked at Customer Service as a support feature. They always saw it and acted on it as a way to make serious money.
@@charlesmcgehee3227 Dell has excellent no questions asked support in my opinion. They overnighted a FedEx box after I broke my 24" ebay used monitor and I had a replacement the next day after the incident. Granted it still had warranty.
@@charlesmcgehee3227 It was a used monitor I bought from someone on eBay and I broke it swinging a broom stick. I contacted Dell and got a new replacement. Dell and Lenovo have excellent customer service especially considering that Apple's is the worst in the business. Even when it is out of warranty they charge you a reasonable price to fix it. TBH I have no idea why people are complaining.
I have owned a couple of Dell computers over the years. They used to be good and one day I went to buy another, but their website insisted on me purchasing bundled software, which I did not want (there was no way to buy the computer without the software), hence I spent my £1500 elsewhere 😉
Yep - this has been a problem for many years, especially in the corporate market where the recipient of the machine is the tech support person who has to uninstall the bundled software. On balance, and comparing with bundled software and poor drivers from other machines, I still prefer Dell. But the gap is closing...
That's a strange thing to say. Go onto literally any Dell product page, hit configure, and there's always some antivirus or MS Office trial that cannot be removed. If you call up an account manager they also cannot remove it. In 10 years of buying approx 20 machines per year, I've never had one without bundled software.
To answer your question though, see this product page. First one I found on the website. MS Office trial pre-installed: e.g. www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/desktop-and-all-in-one-pcs/optiplex-5260-all-in-one/spd/optiplex-5260-aio/n027o5260aio
You do not pay for the bundled trial software. It can be removed. I found HP to be much worse for shovelware. I had an HP netbook for a few months. The shovelware was unusable because of the limited screen resolution. Installing OEM Win7 in place of the supplied version got rid of the shovelware, at a cost, but didn't solve the instability problem. The machine used to lock up requiring pulling the battery to restart. Installing Linux didn't help either. Complete rubbish.
When I graduated high school in 2002, as a graduation gift my dad got me a Dell Dimension tower for my upcoming college term. You best believe as soon as I unwrapped it and the Dell logo on the box was uncovered, my grandpa, always the comedian, shouted, "Dude, you just got a Dell!"
My Frankenstein computer is very old and made of many different computer parts. It has a cd/dvd rom, a Dell monitor, logitech speakers I believe. They are very small but can blast new videos better then older ones for some reason. The tower is a little newer but some of the USB ports require plug in adapter thingies. The cheap wireless mouse is the newest part. Got it for $12 bucks.
@@jasonbowman9521 a man of culture I see
Same graduation year, same graduation gift.
Your gramps sounds like a true legend.
Grandpa awesome
I feel bad for Dell. In 2010 they came out with a 5" phablet called Dell Streak. Nobody bought it and critics said it was too big. Fast forward to 2015 and now EVERYONE is using phones at or near 5", while people consider phablets to be 6" to 8"and they are also pretty popular. Dell was ahead of it's time.
Just goes to show that nobody really knows what they want.
wasn't it running windows phone 7? maybe that has something to do with it. it caused Dell to leave the phone market like when HP left the phone market in 2016 after the Elite X3 didn't sell well running windows 10 Mobile
not really related but dells old mobile software sucks really bad
No, It was running Android with will Dell interface on top. I remember the reviewers saying "you will look ridiculous with this thing near your face" and then in 2011 Samsung Note is introduced and becomes a big hit.
@@insanecarpatian5658 LMAO yep
Why not title this video "What the Dell happened?"
I shouldn't be laughing
LMAO good one bruh
Good one "Dude!"
Bananaana da da da Dunna dunna
Smart title. But this kind of title might confuse people who doesn't speak english on daily basis
Just imagine being Michael Dell's roommate in college, watching him make $6 million in sales in his first year in college. He was probably like, "bruh."
And hopefully the roommate also said, "Yeah, the fuckin' pizza is on you until the end of the semester."
I would have honestly taken that insider info and bought my tuitions worth in stocks or something. Or if they were cool I would have just asked for a Job
@@deandupont5503 LOL. You don't get rich by buying a lot of pizza for people just because you're making bank. MD likely had no friends in college that knew he was making that money. If he did, they would have been on him day and night to scrounge for sure.
Probably got him lots of coochie.
Anyone who is rich now is either ancient or has inheritance money from their daddy.
It's just one anecdote, but when I recently ordered a Dell online, the sales rep emailed me a highly inaccurate transcript of our dialogue, the computer I received was defective, and the tech support person was shockingly ignorant. I had no choice but to return the computer and buy a different brand. Dude, I didn't get a Dell.
Dude didn't get his sale. lol
Im guessing you got an Indian sales rep that is only there to sell you software and warranty you don't need?
@@aurakille2148 I forget what the sales rep tried to sell me, though he was Indian and probably tried to sell me software and a warranty. I just distinctly remember that the supposed transcript of our conversation that he emailed me had nothing to do with what we actually discussed.
@@DavidKowalski Probably sent you someone else's on accident.
@@BungieStudios That was my first thought, even though the dialogue was about the precise model I was looking at. Whatever the case, I considered it just one of a string of errors/problems I experienced trying to buy from Dell.
Remember Gateway in the cow print boxes?
True, my only compu..gateway desktop
That image actually popped into my head at the start of this video, even before the classic Dell commercials did.
True, its been 12 years..2006
I had two of them. They both still work, Just too outdated but a good product in my experience
Need a gateway video
You should do Gateway next. That company fell even harder i think
Still in business??
Compaq
F James yeah but they are owned by acer
@@Sam42069 ok, l did not know
Oh yeah, Gateway. Their fall was spectacular. I worked for them from 1995-1997 in tech support. Back then, they were growing and they were looking at trying to replace Dell in computer sales. Their fumbling definitely started with the release of the Wearnes 6x CDROM drive. There was some clown in the sales department that locked the company into a deal where we had to support that piece of shit no matter what.
We weren't even allowed to admit we knew the drive was bad, and had to replace it with another Wearnes drive we knew wouldn't work. We had to make the customer open the case, reseat all the cables attached to the drive and only then were we allowed to replace it. Over 20 years later and I can still recall the part number for that damn drive. I had to write up so many replacements. We went through about 5 revisions of the failed Wearnes drive before we just replaced them all with 8x CDROM drives from Sony, but that was a long few months supporting that shit drive from Wearnes.
Now, one bad part wouldn't kill a company, but Gateway then tried to get ISO9000 certification, and then you had internal sabotage start up. We lost some truly important trouble shooting tools in tech support that we needed to help customers because somebody claimed it wasn't ISO 9000 compliant. Employees that could read the handwriting on the wall resorted to hiding their resources to prevent some clown from confiscating them so we could do our jobs. Needless to say the quality of our tech support, the thing we were know for, started to take a serious hit. The third party contractors whom were hired at this time were not trained very well and further killed our numbers.
By 1997, I quit and went back to college. People I knew stayed on for a while longer. Eventually, the idiots at the top tried to force tech support into becoming sales. They required each tech to sell upgrades or peripherals while fixing problems. Lack of sales would get experienced techs fired. Further killing the tech support quality.
I was a retail sales manager for Dell back in 2005-2006ish. The fact that when customers, and employees, had to call for support they had outrageous wait times and could barely understand the outsourced personnel definitely contributed to people's reluctance to buy Dell.
I was born in 2005 🤣🥲🥲🥲
Robert your political correct comment "could barely understand the outsourced personnel" and this TH-cam "poor customer support" is so typical of every one now being more concerned about being racist than stating the facts. Which is DELL outsourcing to Indian IT service support centers where both accent and cultural forms of speaking was the problem. Such as "The problem being is the problem which I am understanding to your problem is being the problem which I will now ascertain the problem I now wish you describe your problem to me ". I know this because I once both trained for DELL and for Microsoft as a senior MCT and both companies in the desire to make more profit chose to employ Indians and and fly them in to England to be trained on DELL products. What I and several fellow contracted IT Trainers employed to bring them up to speed that most of them had been sent by Indian recruitment agencies in mainly Delphi most could not really speak English and openly boasted to each other the bribes they paid to get into DELL. Their accent and form of speaking made it hard for us Trainers to understand what they weer saying. We alos very quickly realize they had lied or supplied fake qualifications about their IT skills which were virtually zero. I had to stop one opening up a DELL because he wanted to sit some where else which was not near a electrical socket as he wanted to put batteries in it would work and he was poking about the circuit board with his hands and it was still live.
It was a total farce and my self and eight other trainers all free-lancers ended our contracts because there was no made we were going to meet the Microsoft MCSE exams that DELL had set fro them to pass to become a DELL Service Technicians plus what we weer being paid for.
The solution by DELL was to contact agencies in the UK and Indian and hire Indian IT Trainers and even though I cannot vouch as being true (which all the above is) apparently a special deal was done with Microsoft that qualification would be given not on the basis of passing the MCSE exams but attendance only. I went abroad for a few years and came back to the UK to retire, on needing a new PC I considered getting a DELL as for the price they were good PCs. I rung up DELL UK to find both sales and PC support weer all Indian based and have to say, it was atrocious and because I was spending so much time saying "Pardon" I gave up and went elsewhere.
@@wakeupuk3860 Me too. It was ridiculous. And this was as a Dell customer, buying a new one. I checked out HP customer service and they had English as first language people. I thanked them for knowing English.
How much money did Dell save to do this? Did they ever do a cost comparison? Cost of English speakers vs. Los of Sales?
I remember when their ad guy got busted for smoking pot and the running joke became, “Dude, you’re getting a cell!”
And now, it's legal. He would get an endorsement deal.
HAHAHA
@@KameraShy not in Florida, thanks a chitty governor. Medical yeah but it costs more than a a street corner.
i remember that
I was shocked when I found out that guy smoked weed. Joking.
The rise of company man.
PowahSlap Entertainmint aye you that dude that commented on The Today I Found Out video. You like flat soda I can’t fuck with you
500k spacial
Twenty Vue thats what im saying!
And fall
PowahSlap Entertainmint why you copy Justin Y. ?
I didn't even realize Dell had a decline. I'm watching this on my Dell Inspiron.
Dell declined from their heyday but its still going strong, just not as good as they used to be.
I believe him about HP. I've had my laptop since 2013 and it's still running like a horse with Windows 10
they had a few really bad years around 2004. One thing not covered was their terrible BTX form factor that was incompatible with almost anything 3rd party, and ordinary looking power supplies with standard connectors but switched up pin-outs. Put a dell PSU from that era into another PC and you fry it, put a standard PSU in a dell and you fry it.
All those round-ish grey on black machines were chock full of unreliable proprietary shit too
The guy who replaced Michael Dell made a clownshow out of Dell
@@safetytfh Get 'em! 😂😂💪
I'm suprised when he said that Dell had bad customer service, since I heard that Dell has quite good service.
I remember working for Dell back in 2004 - 2007.. they started me at 33k / year for taking calls on the phone.. over the course of 2 yrs I was given some raises and bonus but they were small.. after a certain point they just stopped .. I worked for almost 2 yrs with no raise in pay and they would literally bring in people that used to work at McDonald's, put them in some 4 week fast paced training course, and then land them on the phones, I ended up training a good chunk of them because they had no idea how to troubleshoot or diagnose hardware problems. Anyone can read a script but walking a 70 yr old over the phone into reinstalling Windows XP or swapping out a hard drive you gotta be somewhat savvy with people.
Yup, I'm in house tech support at the company I work for, and the job is pretty easy, but communication skills and an understanding of what is going on is a must because a lot of the time I'm helping someone fix something who doesn't own a computer at home, and has no idea what they are doing. So you have to translate from geek to English, as I call it.
Maybe a video explaining how HP took over Dell's market? Thanks for the vid!
True, why hp become number one, l got a calculador not a compu..ho
I think he did they bought Compact.
HP had to split, now it is HP for the client side (I wonder if they are throwing their shitty printers into their PC numbers), and they have HPE for datacenter sales, which is also crap as well.
Actually, HP is a lot worse than Dell. I had a Stream 14 that I had used for a year for some light video editing and a bit of web browsing. That white dog turd they called a computer was so bad, I ended up using a Dell and didn't have to deal with those issues after all of that.
My business class is loving your videos!
Professor or student ?
dominick253 you are a cool teacher for showing your students these videos.
Cool teacher!
@@giovanniherrera6037 student
I work for a company’s IT department and all we use is Dell. Laptops, desktops, servers, switches, you name it. Most of the time, they work very well. I’m using a Precision 7760 and it’s a pretty good computer. It has some small QC issues (space bar and shift key is squeaky) but beyond that it’s a solid piece of hardware. I’ve been impressed with them and I work with their stuff every day.
Me 2 lol
My sister does IT for a medium-ish sized company. When they do.mass upgrades she usually snags a free used desktop or laptop for me. They use Dell too and the desktops last forever. My previous one lasted for 5 years - plus however many years it had already been used. Zero complaints. Great workhorse machines.
I must be living in an alternate universe. I remember everyone in grad school having either a Dell XPS or a MacBook. HP a distant third. This was 2017-2020. Had no idea Dell was having issues...
You're not. Dell rose in 90s peaked mid 2000s, declined and up to recently 2018- now Dell is back on the rise.. I also found this video odd
this video is shit
no people hate dell because their computer systems are full of bloatware, their customer service is just THE WORST and have been proven to underperform in a lot of cases because of bad cooling solutions and blaotware.
Many tech and non tech youtubers have been complaining about dell for years now.
@@LKonstantina915 huh. Didn't know that. Aside from an old ThinkPad, what's a better option these days?
Also, wouldn't bloatware just be an OS problem?
@@sauerkrautjr ??? Dude, Do you know what bloatware is? Bloatware are independent pieces of software or utilities that are installed by the manufacturer of the PC. Windows as an OS is just a plain vanilla OS but manufacturers will add those “bonus utilities “ to make your life easier but many of them are unnecessary and they are called bloatware because they take space up in your hard drive and a bunch of them load with Windows taking up precious chunks of RAM. You can delete them all except for the ones that come directly from the manufacturer and even some of those are not necessary. With Windows evolution you hardly need any of them because there is driver support on Windows for almost everything. Smart phones come with them too including iPhones and Android. So the OS is a necessity by itself, everything els could be bloatware except your personally installed software.
"You can tell...its a Dell"
been a staple of describing toasters and potatoes everywhere
Yeah and I'm knocked by a hammer.
my dell is pretty powerful for a laptop i7 7700HQ GForce GTX 1050 ti not the best gpu but i don’t play gpu intense games
CallMeVortex he’s referring to the standard office machine that’s usually equipped with shit specs and integrated graphics.
Bass Stuff I’ve also got one of those but with a $50 discrete gpu
and now, Alienware is owned by them, so they can be known as overpriced on top of that
Watching it on a Dell monitor.
nigga aren't you dead?
I'm typing this on an HP probook. It cost me 129.00 refurbished.
So am I
Me too! :P
I'm watching it on a Dell 1440p 144Hz G-Sync monitor.
I know that Dell is one of the biggest supporters of the "Right to Repair" movement. They use thumb screws on many desktops and some even have a side door lever! My daily driver is the Dell Optiplex 7010, and I love how modular it is.
I put together a Precision T7500 way back starting from an almost basic barebones case (it just had the mbd, PSU and the various cables), quite nicely put together overall, and runs with very low noise (atm it has two 4-core XEON X5570s, 32GB RAM, couple of 15K SAS disks and a Quadro of some kind). A friend told me though that the quality of their later workstation designs went down a lot,
I have a Inspiron laptop too and it just need only one screw to access the internals such as RAM and storage.
There is a difference between being serviceable and right to repair, they still do not make schematics available to third party repair centers or customers for board level repairs, that said their precession and latitude line of laptops are tanks
@@jacksong6226That's true, though they are the only manufacturer that doesn't whitelist upgrades and provides publically available and detailed service manuals for every (decent) laptop that they make.
My parents bought a Dell back in like 2002/2003, and it was such an amazing computer compared to what we had before. I still have and occasionally use the monitor for it.
We named it, "Dude, it's our Dell."
Nice one
My friends and I also said "Dude! You're getting a Dell!"
Dude. You're getting a Dell!
Ahahahahahahhahahhahahahahhaha!
Honestly this just feels like a meme made out of marketing campaigns... kinda like what we have now
They have very poor marketing. I don't remember the last time I saw a Dell ad
Robyn Highart they started switching primarily into supplying corporations instead of consumers, like ibm. So these days they mainly market to Fortune 500 companies and the like
@@Hanapetals Yeah, my workplace still largely relies on Dell computers.
Robyn Highart 2009
Saw a gaming laptop ad once
You don't remember their cover of lollipop?
What the Dell happened?
Your sarcasm was so funny that I forgot to laugh. I never forget to laugh, but this once I did.
That Dellt with him!
Customers got wise on computer prices and then moved on to alternatives
Remember, Dell is in the details.
Hahahaha best one.
Gotta say that I recently bought a Dell monitor and it’s both a fantastic display and was a wonderful value.
i watched this video on a Dell monitor :D
Why didn't you include their huge push towards commercial computing? You also didn't mention Alienware. These are Dells biggest departments that still manufacture and service pcs
Forget alienware the XPS brands and their latitude lines are big sellers
Because in the grand scheme of things they aren't really a computer sales company anymore. As much as you think they make money off selling Alienware computers, it's peanuts compared to their commercial services (ie datacenter support) side.
Alienware is complete dogshit. I can’t believe I sold my Asus ROG for one. Worst mistake in recent memory.
Wrong. There's only a few audience that uses PC as Gaming not worth mention, plus there are abundance of other makers as well as self-built enthusiasts.
@Mc Fireballs nailed it... I'm no fan of Dell but when you're basically relegating your desktop PC business (which is in decade long decline) to focus on upward market trends = decline?
I suggest we bring back the "You're getting a Dell" meme
Santiago Finamore a meme before memes
We can
@@Victor-fp2hn More like a meme before internet memes. Memes in general have existed long before the internet. Just think about that weird S symbol so many kids in multiple schools learned how to draw with seemingly no explanation as to where it came from.
embercoral yeah! my friends dad said he remembered seeing people drawing it!
@embercoral It was called "The Universal S."
Back in like 2010, I worked in Malaysia. We used Dell computers, and a new one was delivered missing one of the locking screws for the motherboard's VGA port. I called Dell, and they said they'll send a screw. Imagine my surprise when in 2 days time, a DELL EMPLOYEE showed up at our door, with a whole new motherboard. Not a screw. This guy had driven from 3 states away (2 hours), motherboard in hand, to replace the motherboard, because a screw was missing. Color me impressed.
Lenovo has service like this in 2018 (in Europe).
The accounting scandal, which you "didn't want to talk about," was very important because it showed that the company wasn't doing nearly as well as it wanted Wall Street to think.
I loved Dell at first. I had 2 or 3 Dell's and loved them. Then I got a real lemon and dealing with barely english speaking tech's really soured me. I would never buy a dell again.
motherboard on mine went out in under 2 yrs... I got an hp and it breathes heavy like an old man.. I do have a Dell from like 2007 that still works... not great. But, a tank compared to Laptops of today. I've spilled beer on it, dropped it, ect. it still kinda does what's needed.
There is no apostrophe for the plural! 2 or 3 *Dells* !
I used to work for a dell call center. Its an aweful company internally. All the non managers are outsourced, overworked, and when they cant squeeze more out of you they fire you. I know i sound salty for being let go but its shit pay for way too much work. i was refused an accomidation for my physical disability by the HR manager. By the time i was let go i was taking tier 1 and 2 cell phone calls, tier 1 and 2 computing calls and a internal section called LOBAS. Worked there for 1 and a half years and was in the top 10% of stats when they let me go.
I have a similar story. I bought my last Dell in 2002. It had an issue with the sound board. I called their tech deparment (of course someone named Jack from India) who said it was a software issue and it wasn't their problem. Funny thing is that all the software was what came with it. So I called the sales department. That guy gave me a phone number to a tech in the US. He ordered a new board and told me to keep his number.
They don't make em like they used to. I have an Optiplex that should be in a museum with fire damage throughout its chassis and water damage from putting out the fire. Still runs including the original hard drive. Meanwhile a skylake optiplex had its mainboard die within two years, then the power supply went out taking two memory modules with it.
Dell also took bribes from Intel around the 2003-2006 era not to use AMD processors (which were usually faster at that time). Nearly forcing AMD to bankruptcy and caused a wider stagnation effect in the rising performance of PC's as Intel's dominance led to lack of innovation which ironically contributed to a decline in PC sales later on.
Tech Unfiltered so dell helped Intel cause the lack of innovation in recent years before AMD’s Rizen CPUs were announced and released?
Correct. Intel paid Dell $1 Billion per year not to use AMD (Athlon CPU's) at the time. The financial stress and failure of AMD's follow up 'Bulldozer' CPU's nearly sank AMD. They also purchased ATI (Nvidia's primary competitor) for too much money which also contributed to AMD's near bankruptcy.
The European Trade Commission ordered Intel to pay Billions to AMD but by then the damage had been done. Thankfully AMD are back with the new Ryzen CPU. There is a fantastic channel on TH-cam that has done some good reporting on this. Check out 'AdoredTV'.
i think intel paid a few big oem's not just dell (maybe hp too), i don't remember exactly. but that was mainly in the enterpise sector, that's where the big bucks are. if it was only the comsumers, amd would have no problem staying alive. but in the long run, they all lost alot of customers.
Intel paid a few OEM's to not use AMD, they kind of had all the power there as enterprise buyers weren't interested in AMD at the time (mostly anyway) so it wasn't like Dell or any other large OEM could tell Intel to f off. Not that it was right, but Dell probably wouldn't exist anymore if they hadn't toed the line.
@badtz maru not exactly, intel paid the oems to not sell amd at all, even their own reserves. at the time, amd cpus were faster and cheaper than intel's, at least in multicore tasks and alot of customers were interested in amd's opterons. but no one could buy because none of the oem's were selling them. intel of corse paid them losses and profits. in a few years, the damage to amd was almost inreversible, if they didn't had the console market, they would have been out (the only reason to thank microsoft's greed).
my old dell computer broke then you uploaded this
Amazing Puppy Dogs 9 rip
Amazing Puppy Dogs 9 the exact same thing happened for me, the power light isn’t even turning on. only an internal orange light.
I worked at a Dell desktop plant for a couple months back in the late 2000's. You got a lot of it right, but the other thing is that they were so much of a desktop computer company that thinking about them as anything other than a desktop company hurt them. The plant closed. I don't think they ever even thought of turning it into a place to build tablets or laptops.
Dude! Love your videos, Company Man! Here's an idea: You could start making follow-up videos. Your videos are very well researched but I'm sure every now and then you find some comments that inspire you to look at the topic from a different angle. Would be cool to get a bit of discussion format going on with some featured user comments, if that's your thing.
I would love to do something like that. Just a little cautious about how the audience would respond.
@@companyman114 My response would be yes, I'd love a follow up series! You don't have to go in depth. You could go mini about it. A miniseries 😂
@@companyman114 follow ups on the popular vids would be sweet. Id do the popular ones or pick and choose. But I'd love them to. Keep up the killer content 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤙🤙🤙🤙
HP took the largest share by acquiring Compaq.
Dell's PCs may not be great anymore but there servers, especially rack mounted, are great.
HP had to do something because their computers were old technology until they acquired Compaq. Compaq was the best computer on the market at their time. If HP had not purchased Compaq when they did, they would have ended like Gateway.
HP acquired Compaq for business desktops, laptops, and servers. HP got rid of the Compaq consumer division and laid off a lot of those people. After the merger, Compaq employees’ suspicions were confirmed. Intel was screwing Compaq on pricing for CPU’s and Chipsets. So, if you want to know why Compaq went downhill, Compaq upper management was letting Intel run Compaq and it only benefited Intel.
In my industry (DoD govt. contracting), Dell is still HUUUUUUUGE. Certainly, HP is their chief competition, but that's a story in itself. HP used to be a waaaay more awesome company. Their test equipment used to be THE BEST, and before they merged with Compaq, their customer service and product design was all TOP NOTCH. Today, consumer HP is frequently pretty weak. When I'm stuck doing physical stuff, I prefer working on Dell equipment to HP. It's better designed, it's more thought out to be serviceable. Dell just sorta bailed on the consumer market and focused more on the business side of things. Their servers and workstations continue to be fantastic.
HP kept the Compaq business desktops and Compaq servers (which were superior to HP's offerings) and dumped the Compaq consumer PC's. Most of the Compaq employees working in the consumer group were either laid off or absorbed by other groups in HP. If you noticed a weakness in HP consumer PC's, it probably had nothing to do with the Compaq merger. In my opinion, HP did the right thing since HP was much stronger in the consumer area than Compaq. HP spun off the test group to become Agilent. Again, that was a good move on HP's part.
Selling computers to companies vs. Consumers is a good idea as corporate customers are way easier to work with than consumers.
verdatum
Dell also switched to marketing to gamers, not sure if that is a good strategy or not, but they did it.
I completely agree. Comparing consumer spec vs enterprise spec hardware, sales or market share among one or more competitors is like comparing apples to oranges. That's because they don't target the same market.
your correct , money is not in PC' s but rather enterprise offering and services , I have heard Dell being descriped as a logistical company rather than a tech company first , this is because of their 24x7 offerings with onsite repair is most countries in the world .. the other vendors just mimic this
My first computer was a Dell Dimension 4600 that I ordered in 2004. It was a great machine and I never had any problems with it. It could do just about anything I wanted with it at the time. It was such a good machine that I ordered a replacement six years later because the Dimension became obsolete. My second computer was a Dell Studio XPS 9100. When fully upgraded, it was a beast of a machine. What turned me off of Dell was their customer service. They outsourced it overseas and that's where their customer service went to crap. I liked that for a time, Dell had customer service representatives that could actually speak English, not half English speaking people located in India. They would probably still have me as a customer if they kept their customer service department here in the US where it belongs.
I was a Dell owner, fan, and IT professional in the early 2000's and watched the downfall first hand.
For me it was when they outsourced all the customer service and went from having some of the best customer service to the absolute worst.
It's about the same time up I upgraded my Laptop from the old high quality model to their cheaper lower quality gear and had to rely on the customer service that we no longer there. It totally burned me and I've watched as Dell tries to squeeze every drop of profit out of all their industry and it doesn't work because it alienates the customer.
Dustin B yeah no kidding!! The service is now crap!!!!!
You are absolutely correct about customer service. I remember making those calls to customer service it was really bad.
But they still got the best mobile workstations.
mr dell got what he came for. its whatever now.
The story of Dell's Owner/CEO is amazing. I would tell everyone to read it. The video is well explained.
Is there a book?
@@eldojoseph8718 yeah there is search on Google.
I'm not buying it.
Edit:
The story that is.
@@godofthisshit Lol, I don't think whether you buy the story or not validates or invalidates the story. The truth is out there, all you have is the ability to persuade yourself and others to believe that your story of the truth, which you basically make no attempt at doing. Well, you open the question, so there's that.
@@catdogfishdogcats I just looked it up. He born to a stockbroker and a orthodontist and received government contracts. These self made stories 9/10 don't pan out.
Forget Dell. I want to know what happened to GATEWAY.
People liked their computer arriving in a "cow box".... but apparently, that was about it.
J T Skateway
gateway bought e machines Acer bought gateway that why Acer makes cheap computer all because of e machines
I miss gateway. They make good cheap-ish prebuilts.
32 bit link All windows PCs are cheap
In quality mostly.
My then girlfriend bought a Dell, turned it on, and it showed there was a virus on it already. She got on the phone and talked to a girl in INDIA with the worst unintelligible accent mispronouncing and syncopating the English language to the point that my girlfriend packed it up and shipped it back. 2 days later I bought her a Thinkpad and it functioned perfectly from day 1.
First time I watched porn was on a dell.
Ken Fulton {Baby Elder} brilliant
The first time I watched Adele was on a porn.
Mine was an iPod
Ken Fulton {Baby Elder} same here i was ten :')
Mine was on an iPhone
Great video - thank you. I feel something you didn't address (or if you did it wasn't detailed fully) was that Dell stopped, at some point, offering comprehensive configuration options on PC's and laptops. At one point very early I recall that HDD's processors OS, RAM, EVERYTHING was customisable. Not so now and not so for a long time now. That customisation stopped around 2010 or a bit earlier and it was the main reason I stopped buying DELL computers. A further thing that alienated me (hey - you didn't mention the Alienware computers either!) was the support centres AND the sales people - all in India or some such place. Communication difficulties became the order of the day for me. It took over half the phone call at times just to discern what the hell the Dell person was saying the accents were so broad and indecipherable. Anyway, I could have possibly persisted with that BUT the end of customisation on the web site when buying was the real show-stopper for me. To this day I don't know why they cut down on the options so much. The upside is I leaned how to build my own computers and whilst time consuming is much more satisfying. It used to be VERY convenient to buy a DELL though! Thanks again for a great story!
I quit buying off the shelf / special order PCs as well. Built my Computer like 6 years ago and it is still going strong doing everything I need it to. I still bought a HP laptop for the wife at Walmart for the wife to surf the web and do social media stuff on. It does what she needs. Plus, I don't feel like learning how to build laptops.
Yes Zakky, I know. However it is only a former shadow of itself and as I mentioned in my comment it is no longer "offering comprehensive configuration options" - it is only offering VERY basic choices.
My first new computer was a Dell desktop. My middle school and high school self put it through hell in back. Upgrading video card, Ram, tipping dvds to an ipod...questionable websites. Man, I miss that rig sometimes. I might buy a shell and make a nostalgia machine out of it.
I never bought a "branded" computer in my life, why? I suppose because no-brands are cheaper, and the components are the same, often even better, because they use retail parts, not cut-off underpowered OEM custom made versions.
Good old days for sure. Nothing better than a three minute boot up for that windows 98 welcome
@Walker Glover exactly, brand computers charge more for the same parts, and even if their oem versions are not cut-off, sometimes are diverse enough that the generic manufacturer's drivers don't work, so you're stuck with their drivers, wich get rarely (if ever) updated, and when a new OS comes out some components may not work anymore.
rvbrexer
What do you think you're better than me?
@Walker Glover we call(ed) them "assembled PCs", they have no name because they're put together in little PC stores by the store owner, my first 2 PCs were like that, then I started assembling myself. I said "called" because I don't know if these little stores still exist (they probably moved to e-bay).
About 20 years ago, my grade school class saw the dude you’re getting a dell guy on a field trip at an aquarium. We chased him down, and tried to get him to say the phrase. He ran away. Poor guy, he probably couldn’t go out anywhere in public lol
To add to your video, another reason why Dell probably did so well back then but not today was because how fast computers were changing back then compared to today. Back then, it didn't take very long for some new faster products to come out that had been significantly better than before. In today's world, you could really get away with running stuff around 6 years ago and not have too many issues. Right now I'm running a computer that's probably close to 9 years old (minus the video card, that's about 7 years old) and still play most games ok and do what I want. You'd have a really hard time doing that back when Dell was in it's heyday.
less to do with that and more todo with the fact most of those people were first time buyers - for the entire period of growth.
More first time buyers but the replacement market was huge. Now the product life cycle is longer.
Very True. I am still using a Mac Pro early 2008, that's 10 yrs old. I have upgraded the hard drives and video card. But the core computer still runs great. Back in the day I would upgrade my computer every 2 years. Same goes with iPhone. The only reason I upgraded to the iPhone 8 from my iPhone 6 is that I accidently put the 6 through a washer cycle. Otherwise I will still be rocking the iPhone 6.
Firestorm2900 I bought consumer and business computers and peripherals beginning in 1980s. Best way to describe it was you were jumping off a moving train regarding technological performance.
I use a dell computer with pfsense installed and a wireless NIC instead of a shitty overpriced consumer wifi router. It has 10x the processing power, 10x the RAM, 10x the customization, 10x the extensibility and 10x the flexibility. I think it's more about the consumer market and people with little to no knowledge of computing at the same time wanting easy shit and are also willing to pay more for it. Maybe I'm just be cynical kek. Maybe not.
You totally glossed over that Dell has the most market share for enterprise hardware and servers
Yep, Dell is huge in the IT space. Bigger than HPE even. They also own VMware which is a pretty significant IT technology as well.
It's addressed toward the end.
Company Man - you kinda addressed it, but it was a very light addressing of it.... I think it would have been more interesting to get more details about the EMC acquisition / VMware as those two company are more interesting that dells origin story.
I agree it was light. I guess personally I found it a little less interesting, plus the video was meant to focus on the decline.
No issues - I don't find the desktop business interesting - I don't think the manufactures do either - its very low profit. Alienware would have been interesting as a gaming platform. What's also probably more what I expected from your channel would be about the way Dell structured its deal to buy EMC/VMware, and how its going 'public' again. There is tons of what I expect is very interesting in that setup if you can get good information on it... But overall I enjoy your videos, just wanted you to know that too!
"From 2003 to 2005 Dell shipped 11.8 million PCs with a known defect but chose not to fully disclose the situation to all of its customers" (faulty capacitors). They lost the trust of the public, especially business users.
Ah yes, the capacitor plague.
Almost every PC maker had bad caps during that period. I remember having to do warranty claims for hundreds of HP machines as well
Oh, yes, i remember the capacitor plage... : )
At this time, i was Dell field technician for servers. I had changed lots of server motherboards with bad capacitors. All defective motherboards with chinese capacitors. All motherboards were returned to Dells factory for refurbishing with good capacitors.
Hp also had the same capacitor problems.
@
Anton Eitsah
The faulty capacitors was not the fault of DELL.
The Capacitor plague as it became know as was the result of the theft form Rubicon, the formula for low ESR Capacitors using a water based Electrolyte.
However the manufacturers who used the stolen formula were not aware that there were other 'Secret' ingredients in the formula, ingredients that were not included in the 'cloned capacitors' thus by this reason the capacitors (other than the genuine RUBICON manufacture) were flawed by design as a result of an incomplete formulated electrolyte.
As it is common for any manufacturer to buy components at the lowest price, the 'less expensive' clones were used rather than the RUBICON brand.
Such errors are common when cost of manufacture is more important than Quality (which obviously adds to the manufactured cost)
Cap plague is still a thing, just not as bad.
I have purchased many Dell laptops and desktops for personal use and business since 2005 or so and I have never had a bad one. I still have 3 old Dell desktops and 3 old laptops that still work well for what they are. I recently purchased a Dell Rugged laptop and it is pretty awesome as well.
How about the fall of Gateway Computers?
Gateway is owned by Acer Inc. which also owns the brands of Packard Bell and eMachines.
I heard that Steve Jobs never did much market research because he wanted new ideas but he did have research done on Gateway specifically to figure our what /not/ to do with their stores
Gateway 2000 with the cow spots in the box. My first PC 486sx@33
Gateway , emachines dell etc gave pc a terrible name and probably made apple what it is today . Good riddance
I had a gateway, mother board failed. I bought a Dell because the US Government used them. Going strong for over 15 years and counting.
We could have had Dell rolling in the deep
I see what you did there.
Lmao
Yall remember when the Dell kid got caught with cocaine? Haven't seen him since
Dude, he went to jail..
It was marijuana...he was accused of buying a bag of marijuana in 2003, so Dell terminated his role, and he was blacklisted from acting...today he can only find minor roles...
Hillers62 +And Dell denied that that was the reason.
th-cam.com/video/5mLGJsxhCHk/w-d-xo.html
Here you go.
ooops. I thought it was just a lil' pot. Oh well he got fired over a lil' coke. lol.
I never thought of Dell being #1. I still use Dell today (Alienware laptops) and I like how I am able to find used parts should something break on the computer. Many cheaper computers don't have a market for replacement parts and the whole PC is trash if anything breaks.
For some reason, I see Apple Macbooks as a bigger threat to eat Dell's market share. I see lots of people using them (I'm talking teachers, college students, and even tech people) and they always look down on me for not "getting with the times". Apple is thought of as leading the way into the future with other brands catching up.
Apple has never really been a threat in that market. Apple currently sits at 7% market share while Dell holds 28.5% . Apple has never gotten more then 10% market share in the home PC market.
I certainly wouldn't trust college students to make wise financial decisions...
what happened to gateway computers ?
I loved gateway.... The early days of everyone rushing to get a home pc and they got attention with the cow box on the doorstep ads. I was sad when they went to crap.
Gateway purchased eMachines then Gateway was purchased by Acer who also purchased Packard Bell and then later decided to discontinue the eMachines brand and only use the Gateway brand as low end machines in north America and the Packard Bell brand for low end machines in anywhere but north America
I had a Gateway for a few years and it served me well.
The thing that was cool about Gateway was they tried to be their own box stores for a time, so you could get legitimate direct help with any problems. They seemed to come and go very quickly both in my town and in quality...
and the Netscape browser!
the computer i'm commenting with is from dell
big oof
How is this worthy of comment?
@@PatrickMcAsey felt like it
@@PatrickMcAsey because everyone who has bought anything from dell knows the pain this person went through
@@hiro_6015 I'm sure you're right! I bought from them once but haven't been back since. I can't exactly remember why, but I don't think I was that impressed with the quality of the product or how long it lasted.
Why oof?
Can you do a "What happened to Gateway2000" video? :)
Yes
Please
Windows Xp as well
Gateway's were solid machines. Also built with off the shelf components. I recommended them to clients. I think their decline began when they opened all those stores with all the accompanying overhead and problems. There was another company that did well selling computers by mail and went down the tubes after opening stores. Can't remember the name offhand.
Dell did
I think Dell have been doing really well in the past couple of years. My current machine is a Dell and when I decide to upgrade I plan to buy another one because I am happy with quality they provide especially compared to HP and Asus for examples.
I've been checking out their XPS series and with the 2020 update they have really upped their game. Dell no longer sells budget computers. They are focusing on premium business laptops as well as the gaming industry with their Alienware.
And this is just the PC branch not to mention all the services they provide.
they bought alienware and then cheapened them. tech support for alienware used to be in america, they outsourced it. totally ruined it. i remember when dell bought them, they said "were going to still be alienware, dell just allows us to buy parts cheaper!" yea, it didnt last long. just build your own pc. you get better parts, cheaper, and arent held back by proprietary hardware. my main computer is going on 10 years, and with a graphics card upgrade is still playing current games. try that on a dell, or alienware. wont happen.
I have the xps 8930 tower and it was great until a year after I bought it, coincidentally that was also when my warranty ran out. It started to freeze and is now in repair, turns out the processor has some sort of problem? It's still not fixed. It might just be my bad luck though, because I generally like Dell!
I wish I could agree with you, but the experience I've had with them has been shocking. First I buy a laptop for $2300 via paypal, the next day they email to say they have a payment error which shouldn't happen. I call today to ask what happened, they tell me they got it only to charge both my paypal and my bank account! Effectively I've given them $4600 and have to wait until next week for them to figure out how to do a refund. Took 10+ calls, half of which didn't even go through because their answering machine sent me to a dead line and not the extension number for customer care. They're not malicious, but god they are hopeless.
@@Relatablename sorry but who uses PayPal in 2021? Their security is really bad and this has happened to me in the past with other business. Problem wasn't with Dell, it was PayPal where the issue lies.
Also when buying a pc/laptop I never buy directly from the manufacturer, resellers tend to be more trustworthy here in the UK and Europe in general (if you know where to look).
@@Luyco I know it's been a year since you made your comment but just heads up if your based in Europe you are entitled to two years guarantee by law. If they want to give you only one, just mention the customer rights act and they will quickly deal with the issue.
I remember calling tech support for Dell back in 05 and I could not understand one person over the phone. Tech support was over in India. Nightmare call. They never fixed what I called for I fixed it myself. I will admit that old computer from 2001 still going strong even though it's outdated
India for IT support is almost everywhere these days.
I got a new alienware laptop and had internet issues and called them and I could not understand them for the life of me. It was ridiculous. Ended up just fixing the problem myself.
Its great when you outsource to people who can't speak English.
@@abloogywoogywoo these companies maximize profits. So they outsource to India for cheap customer service.
Try being an onsite tech for Dell and you end up speaking to them to just order parts while onsite to fix something and the shit they sent has nothing to do with the problem. The tech support for techs are the same people that customers talked to just to get me out there. They run the same script on Dell techs and its fucking crazy. I ended up quitting in three months.
What about the capacitors of death they had. I was swapping 5 to 15 dell motherboards a day and it was I believe the GX270, GX260 models. We were told that Dell took a big hit for that. A subcontractor in Taiwan over filled some capacitors and these were used on various motherboards. Apple and HP were hit a little, and Dell took a bigger hit.
That wasn't Dells or Apples fault, a bad supply was out of their hands.
This happened to us as well with our GX270 models. Dell called it a "proactive replacement" of the boards in these systems rather than recalling them to prevent another stock price collapse like they had with those laptop batteries catching fire. We stuck by them however and had great results with later models, especially the 7010 model. But the 7020 models were subpar and we ended up going with Intel NUCs after those.
@@williambaldwin9346 I agree but the manner in which Dell did not inform us of the known issue until after we called several systems into them for repair was unacceptable. They were fortunate that we elected to stay with then after that board replacement situation.
Dell had a problem with their motherboards on those 2 model. I was IT that normally spent 100's of millions per year in new roll outs. I worked IT since 1985 and I don"t now because of disease. I was certified by Dell and always liked Dell, but the capacitor problem did occur. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague DELL replace motherboards quickly and without question. "In 2005, Dell spent some US$420 million replacing motherboards outright and on the logistics of determining whether a system was in need of replacement" I was with Lockheed Martin at that time.
@@LazyRunner-rf3jc I don't think anyone was denying the capacitor problem. They were saying that it was a bad supply and it wasn't only Dell. Everything with electrolytic capacitors from the mostly off brand Chinese and noname Korean suppliers was affected. Dell just took a huge hit because the large market share they had.
Those bad caps kept me from being homeless during 08-10. Flipping TV's from Craigslist was pretty good money for a while. Free or almost free TV a few dollars in parts and $200 profit.
Wednesdays are for company man ❤️
When a company says "We need to maximize profits for our share holders". Their quality suffers. Same thing happened to Compaq.
Also, that kid lost his contract for drug possession. That probably had something to do with the early decline too
Yeah, even in the early 2000s people by and large were offended by drug laws and corporate policies.
i remember when that happened
Dell is on the rise again since they went private.
Person74 Apparently Dell is going public again so they can get more capital influx
Yeah, XPS laptops are really great
yup. Their recent laptop introduction are great and I am typing from one of them :)
Their laptop these days aren't so bad. I had one good for video streaming.
Mine which I got less than 2 months ago won’t stream videos and goes to the blue screen after a minute or two of it.
“Company Man, bigger than you know.”
0w0
whats this?
UwU
I went for a work related trip to Austin in the early 2000s. On a spare afternoon, my co-worker and I drove up to the Dell campus a little ways north of Austin to just look around. There was 7 or 8 office buildings on the campus. It was rather remarkable to think that only about 15 years prior, this guy was selling PCs out of his college dorm room. (edit) I think I would disagree that Dell has "declined". Maybe they sell less consumer PCs, but in the government market, Dell, together with HP, are the king of vendors, and one of the biggest tech companies in the entire world. The title of this video "The Decline of Dell: what happened?" sounds like it's a company headed towards extinction, which isn't even remotely the case.
Great vid!
You really should do Glock at some point. Some Austrian who had no history in firearms made what is now the most popular pistol in the US, probably the world. Lots of fun drama and intrigue too, including an attempt on Gaston Glock's life.
I love my alienware 13. It has actual cooling, it has specs that makes sense (e.g. not having a 1440p screen paired with a 1060), and it has a 4 hour battery life. When the motherboard got fried they sent somebody to my house to fix it which I now find all the more interesting knowing now that they were one of the first to pioneer this practice.
I own many dell laptops over the years. Old xps 13 m1330, Alienware and the new xps. They don't have the best engineering as my hp last longer out of warranty. Their consumer service is the only reason I bought Dell. Repairing it at home is the best thing ever and they do it in nearly all the country theyre in. However for corporate use I found HP and Lenovo is better as their service is faster.
Nah Yeah welcome to the world of gaming laptops
@ So you can play anywhere?
sonickiller360 I had a similar experience with my alienware. I had a corrupted hard drive and they sent someone to replace it. Had a great experience with their customer service.
I have that (the Alienware r13) it is amazing
In the early 2000's when Dell was at its peak, 2 bad things happened. First their customer service could not keep up with demand and as a result it deteriorated. Secondly and surprisingly - Dell started to blacklist buyers who purchased too many PC's, customers who Dell felt was suspicious for whatever reason. Dell maintained separate consumer and business markets, providing excellent technical support to the business class and education market while letting consumer markets suffer. I suspect much of the falling from grace Dell ran into was the consumer market walking away and switching to tablets and other brands of PC. Plus they clearly had a Y2K peak rolling out solid performing systems that lasted the consumer market rather long (business market would have leased their computers and had a pre-set rotation that provided clean refurbs to the consumer market. I am typing this on a Dell that I bought at a bricks and mortar store, and it is nothing special.
Their customer service and tech support were being told what to do by college students who learned marketing but were put in charge over everything in the company of which they had no knowledge. The phone support you got had between 16 to 19 minutes from the moment you got on the phone to get you off it and if you got tech support, it would often take up to ten minutes to get the customer set up where they could open the computer and then nine minutes to do thirty minutes of examining what's wrong with the supervisor often hanging over their shoulder either pointing to the clock on their phone or tapping their watch. They had a hotline to send out a tech often for no other reason than they forgot to plug in their computer and couldn't get the power button to work.
You would not believe the level of incompetence running that company by 2006 when I hired in but once you hired these people, they refused to learn anything because they were almost always way to arrogant, making mistakes all over the place, cheap as hell, and either over designing the computers when they had no idea what they were doing or telling the designers what to do which is when their computers truly became garbage with all the rest of us working for the company trying to tell them what was wrong but since these people were the ones we were telling... well, you can gather nothing was done about it. The turnover rate for employees was enormous and the stress was so bad from all the angry customers and having about 19 minutes to get them off the phone that people were literally falling out of their chairs and being carried to the hospital while angry customers were calling in ten to thirty times (I kid you not) for the same issue that wasn't resolved.
That's what you get for hiring people who didn't know what they were doing, wouldn't listen and were too arrogant to learn because they were college graduates and knew everything when they might have known marketing but nothing about the actual product. I guess that actually started with the success of the Dude commercials but when Michael Dell left the whole thing began to collapse.
My very first laptop was a Dell inspiron that my dad brought me back in 2011. After 10 years it still runs fine. Out of all brands laptops I’ve seen, Dell has best in industry screen and their customer service is surprisingly good. And they’re back with their high end laptops in recent years, Dell is making a comeback
I'm still using my dell inspiron from 2009. I can't let it go. It's my childhood :'(
Still using my dell alienware m15x from 2009!
you forgot that during the 03 to 05 era, they really got nailed by the substandard capacitors that where used at the time. It caused a lot of motherboard failures and the clamshell cases caused overheating issues. I was an outsourced Dell onsite tech from 03 to 06. It was rough, the customer service was horrible.
I totally think that the "dude, you're gettin a dell" should be brought back as a meme
superfragilisticatexpialidoshmur it would make so much sense with our generated comedy
Hp are junk. All the hps i had would fall apart once the warrenty failed. Dell computer I bought is still going strong.
for real bro, i bought hp 10 after 1 year its suddenly power off, warranty already end, they say i fry my cpu and they will not responsible for that.
yah my dell xps 17 still going strong and its 8 years old, my dad bought an hp laptop and the fans, the hdd, and the screen all encountered problems by the 3 year mark. Dell still goes hard, theres just too much competition nowadays for one company to have computers monopolized.
Well for some years after they bought in compaq those business machines weren’t that bad but it was only short lived around 2001 until 2007,
its true my screen on my hp died 1 week after warranty and they said its my problem fuck hp
HP's past 2011 have actually been receiving better reviews and feedback than recent Dell PCs. The XPS line has some real widespread problems which are fairly evident in their reviews. Just go on Google Shopping and look at the star rating, it's crazy! Get out of the past. My Envy is 8 years old and is still being used heavily to this day.
I've owned a couple of Dell computers myself, one is an XPS 1810 and the other is an XPS 2720 AIO, both are still going, although both had engineer callouts during their warranty and I had to send the XPS 2720 off to Germany for a major repair (the screen failed) a couple of years after it ran out. The organisation I worked for bought various Dell desktop and laptop models, but moved to another manufacturers products as they were cheaper. I'm just hearing from others that the quality of the components and the build is not as good as it used to be. Other companies have caught up and overtaken in what they offer, hopefully Dell will improve and produce some real decent models in the future.
The reason Dell went south is that they started selling crap. The last (and I do mean LAST) 2 Dell laptops I bought were defective out of the box. Literally. I opened them, turned them on, and they failed. I spent hours and hours and hours on the phone with what they laughingly called "Customer Support, less than affectionately known as Dell Hell." They adamantly refused to replace the machines, but did eventually make required repairs. It certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. BTW, I'm typing this on my HP. Suck it, Dell.
+Jeep Man Dell offers are 30-day return policy, so you can return a Dell product for any reason within this time period. From a defective computer, not liking the build quality, purchasing another computer since you ordered the Dell, to just changing your mind about wanting a new computer, Dell will accept the computer back within 30 days.
If you purchased a system from Dell and it did not work upon arrival, you could have just returned the computer. I am a tech consultant who often recommends Dell and there have been a few cases where the system was defective out of the box. In these cases, Dell always accepted the return.
However, I usually have my clients purchase directly from Dell. If you purchased your Dell laptops from another retailer, such as Best Buy, Amazon, etc., then the return policy of the retailer would apply.
Both purchased directly from Dell, and they did, indeed, refuse to replace them. I could have returned it? The reason I ordered was that I needed a laptop. I didn't want to return it - I wanted a working laptop (that I paid for,) preferably without spending a week on the phone. Alas, it was not to be. BTW, the second laptop did eventually work, but it took Dell 2 tries to get it operating correctly.
Very similar to my experience. I used to buy Dell, but then my last 2 purchases resulted in a total of 6 repairs and returns. I have had no problems at all with any of my HP and Lenovo kit. They also changed to an offshore Indian sales force, who continue to irritate me to this day.
We buy latitudes in our corporate environment. I'd say half of the laptops complain about nor having a big enough power supply eventhough it is and is what is shipped with the laptop. Not impressed.
You are spot on. See my comment above.
They fired the guy who said "dude, your getting a DELL"
Named Ben Curtis, He got arrested in 2003 for having marijuana.
I hope the cop said, "Dude, you're goin' to jail".
@@rustyshackelford8769 'dude, you're getting a cell!'
They ruined his life because he chose to use a plant that some turds say is illegal.
Marijuana causes hallucinations and is more addictive than cocaine . ive seen a lot of lives ruined over that " Plant " .
A widely assumed reason, but not true as Snopes discovered. See:
www.snopes.com/fact-check/dude-youre-getting-the-boot/
Could their less emphasis on R&D costed them in the long run?
Sure, they sold products on the cheap, but when you’re not following trends or coming up with new innovations, you’re going to get stuck behind.
I'm in the IT business and I can tell you that Dell EMC is very much alive and active in the Enterprise server space. I'm reminded of this every time I run a service call in a Data Center.
This video is an accurate description of the company's decline when it comes to the personal computer, this, as the pc has become a commodity which makes it hard for anyone in the market to differentiate and make their margins. However, the firm is now focussing on solutions to support those same products that have become commodities, meaning that when you go a step further into infrastructure, networking, storage, data analytics and -security (just to name a few) chances are you'll still end up using one of DELL's products/services. This is all part of the Digital Transformation. Michael Dell knew this years ago and has been working towards solidifying the company's innovative technological position within the IT sector.
I'm watching this while in the office at Dell. 😁
John Anderson I live close by. Do most employees at Dell telecommute? Rarely see many cars in the huge parking lots
Proprietary motherboards killed them for me, in a world of swapable parts it was the only machine that tried this strategy.
Can you elaborate?
As an end user you couldn't upgrade the machine it became trash as the end of its life. Go over to Ebay and type Dell motherboard and you will see all the convoluted shapes they used. The key word here is ATX, Dell used non ATX which was the industry standard since the late 80's
Ok. I used Dell systems in a business environment where upgrades were typically RAM, hard drives and expansion devices.
Yeah, for commercial applications Dell can hardly be beat.
*beaten
I paid $800 for a Dell gaming laptop in 2017 after my Digital Storm desktop of seven years broke. Has been working well even as I'm typing this. But I understand the hate Dell gets. I would be hesitant too because they don't really have a great track record. I'm going to buy a new build, but likely won't choose Dell. I wish I could build my own, but I can't because of my physical disability.
Back in about 2010 when I had a Dell, I had to call customer service and it was appallingly poor. The highlight was, after repeating it very slowly several times, the rep refused to take my phone number (of the phone I was calling on) because "it didn't have enough digits."
After dragging on for several weeks, I realised they simply did not have the capacity to provide any form of support, so when buying another computer I chose a company that did.
@@andrew_koala2974 oh absolutely I agree, but with other companies I at least found politeness and some vague competence
Sehnsucht they not only didn’t help, but they did charge my debit card for no help at all. I’ll never buy Dell again
Sears filing for bankruptcy in the near future, they're in the process of applying for it right now. Care to cover it?
Grant pull Ljubljana o iknpbkbkbok
All of their stores shut down in Canada a few months ago actually, quite sad.
It is kinda sad! So much history, man.
Wow, family guy predicted that
Sears Canada went bankrupt then finally closed the last stores about a year ago. Surprised they are not gone in the US after hemorrhaging money for nearly a decade.
I was in tech support right about when Dell lost it's top spot. I never owned a dell, most of my personal machines were hand built. The complaints that I heard from Dell owners was that the CS went down hill and fast. The complaints that I had were about people bringing in Dell towers and me wincing. Dell had a bad habit of using proprietary or at least non-standard parts. This is fine I suppose while you're in warranty, but not so fine once the warranty wears out and you have a part fail. Replacing a power supply is usually a quick, easy and cheap repair job, or it is when you're using a standard one. When it's a funky size to fit inside a weirdly shaped tower case, not so much. As a result, I became very hesitant to guarantee I could fix anything on dell computers. Other manufacturers did it occasionally, but not as often as dell did.
Yup
Sony saw that and did it 100x as much:)
I just junked a Dell computer because of its proprietary parts. That's what happens when companies forget whet made them successful. With Dell it was straying from using standard components.
Never once seen the Dell commercial from the 90's. Back in 98 I repaired my first ever computer and ever since; I have built my own systems. Only owned two dell systems in my entire 25 year history of owning PC's. One was a donation from my high school for my school work at time time; and the other one was a second hand system that someone purchased for the CPU it had and put it up for sale on FB marketplace. If you count laptops in the mix I owned 3 Dell's. Their laptop models to me at least have a better aesthetic appeal then the desktop.
Please do decline of toshiba aswell
RIP there computers
They were never that good
That would be neat
Toshiba also makes CT scanners
all that Toshiba bloatware !! They ran pretty well once you removed it all.
Their mid 2000s flat screen tvs were awesome
Haha! I'm so glad I stumbled across this!
I used to work for Dell back in 2001-2004ish?
At that time, the company was trying to get into the laptop market. It was rough. The Inspiron? I think it was the Inspiron, was supposed to be the flagship laptop. It...was okay. The screen had some weird filmy look to it, the cd drive was problematic...we had a lot of returns.
It was an improvement over the prior models though. I was talking to one tech and he had one come in where a fuse had blown out next to the screen. I'm sure the customer was not happy about this. Had another one with bullet holes through it. Mind you, this was Austin, Texas. XD Needless to say, the customer was less than pleased with the performance of the laptop.
I personally had one where the ticket said the reason for the return was "Act of God" XD Again, only in Texas would any laptop be returned and accepted for a reason like that! Haha!
If you're curious, I was a motherboard tester. We had racks upon racks of mockups to test motherboards. I was mainly in the refurbishment area.
At that time, I remember Michael Dell's strategy at that time was gaining market share which lines up nicely, timeline-wise, with what you stated in your video. I think he was trying to crack into the China market. I may be wrong though.
We also were starting to focus heavily into servers. Mostly for businesses that needed scalability. The system was supposed to make it easy to grow as the companies that were using it grew. It was a pretty easy system. Need more servers? Just slide another in. Was pretty slick.
Anyways, it was a nice trip down memory lane for me so, thank you very much!
And yes, I remember the commercials. Everyone at work groaned and rolled our eyes, but for the most part, we liked it. =)
Oh, if I'm not mistaken, the Dell dude was busted for buying weed. Didn't surprise anyone. In my opinion, it just fit his character. XD Not sure if that was the reason those commercials started to fade out.
I think you glossed over or completely missed a lot of the story.
1. HPs rise was fueled by enterprise. They controlled so much inventory especially in that enterprise space that they could easily undercut Dell. At the time many high volume low profit companies went belly up and those in enterprise needed to offer more than just computers and servers. They needed to offer support, deployment and even services or tools for management. Dell simply couldn't compete with HP
2. The rise of Apple and tablets further transformed the PC space. People wanted more quality due to the success of the Mac book and Mac book air. Further these devices became status symbols and Dell was always a poor mans toy. Smartphone and Tablets shrunk the PC market meaning high volume sales wouldn't work plus those devices didn't need a charger to survive more than 2hours
3. Buying the company back meant Dell could move away from high volume low profit to products with better margins. During that time they produced the XPS 13 and 15 ultrabooks which are arguably one of the best windows laptops out there. Shareholders would have prevented the company ever making that move.
"the XPS 13 and 15 ultrabooks which are arguably one of the best windows laptops out there."
*[scoffs in Thinkpad]*
Agreed, but we should also remember how that rise in enterprise came to be. The absolutely stunning/ruthless/amazing job HP did to cut Dell off from their enterprise sales generated via EDS. When EDS was still around they and Dell shared 2 or 3 board members. EDS used Dell internally and more importantly EDS recommended Dell Enterprise hardware in their consulting. HP wanted to force Dell out of the enterprise market and moved to do so by buying EDS. It was a double whammy, Dell lost not only EDS corporate business and their recommendations but now EDS used and recommended HP instead. I would imagine it would make a good business PHD thesis paper. Also, note this move was done by HP not only to cut Dell off but Cisco as well who were also benefiting from EDS enterprise networking recommendations.
Interesting points! :O
this is a great thread
AA Sharp I have no idea why my name is in your comment, it is good info but, my comment is about an event nearly 10 years ago.
I didn’t look up numbers but I see way more Dell PCs vs other brands. When I started working at my current company we had compaq PCs but 23 years later everything is Dell. We don’t even get HP computers. A few times we had equipment come with e-machines or other brands but our IT threw them out and hooked up Dell branded machines. At home I have several old dells but when I buy an off lease machine for myself or someone I get Lenovo or HP. I have not bought a brand new pc in 15 years. Now I just get an off lease and upgrade it. Saves $$$$
I was a Dell fanboy for years and still have and regularly use my XPS420 32 bit from 2007. It honestly needs replacing but if it ain't broke... BUT! It will not be replaced by another Dell. The customer service is abysmal and parts are so incredibly expensive.
Robert Horwat I'm also a dell fanboy just wish they could start making proper products again
Do Gateway computers
d1ngleberry and include the Irish operation.
Dell, for the most part, has always built a good system.
I've used Dell for many years, and as on right now, I have 2 desktops, and 2 laptops. In fact, I'm typing this comment on a Dell Inspiron.
While I totally agree that sales dipped with the advent of tablets and iPads, people are realizing, that in order to successfully edit videos and photos, the tablets aren't cutting it, and the desktop is making a resurgence.
The biggest reason has to do with social media, like TH-cam.
Everyone wants to be the next TH-cam star, and they realize, in order to stand out, they need to edit their videos. Smartphones and tablets just don't have the resources to handle it, and to get that kind of power on a laptop is very expensive, so welcome back desktop!
That's my two cents... That, and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee at 7-11...😉
True but they are just as guilty as apple with built in expiration! The batteries as with most have timers that prevent them from working after so many charge/use cycles even if all the cells are still above 90% I have taken many Dell batteries apart to salvage the cells for flashlights and vape mods when tested them I found less than 1 in 50 that were not charging properly! They use good cells but force you to replace them way before they need to be! And you can’t just replace the rare bad cell because the little chip they put inside the batteries won’t let it power the laptops! Unless you have access to equipment to reset the counter! And there businesses laptops have a high failure rate on certain parts (something Apple is guilty of also) they start to fail when the warranty is up right after 3 years regardless if it’s used heavy or one. A week they all fail! I stopped buying Dell Precision laptops because of this! Don’t get me wrong when the wither are very durable and powerful but they aren’t the same as a custom built system ( I still have a I7 desktop I built in 2010 and it’s functioning just like new today) if it was a Dell it would have been dead years ago and a proprietary part that failed that’s no longer available!
you must have got a bad one! i have been using Dell for years and my only complaint is the Built In Self destruct Dell puts into there products! I don't Buy Their Business Products anymore because of this!
@JoybuzzahzTV they were locked into a demo mode for the store display! Bestbuy and even Walmart does this on systems that allow it to prevent people from messing them up! Someone that should not be in the settings can mess up a system real bad making their job very hard. This is not new in big box stores!!! Even Circuit City did it years ago.
@JoybuzzahzTV as far as your bad luck with Dell I don't know what to say unless they were counterfeit?
Battery timers and counters ehe? Sounds funny, since one old Dell laptop I have is 8 years old, and the battery still works, and charges just fine.
While the charge no longer lasts like it did when it was new, it still has a solid 2 hour run time.
Chemtrails on the other hand...
I had a friend named Del, we would harass him endlessly with that joke.
Female ShitPoster Nice hat.
“Del, you’re getting a Dude!”
I’ll show myself out.
Del Griffith?
“had”
@Modding Error I think so
Well you gotta hand it to Dell, he was actually living the dream, I mean how many people do we know today that drops out of college and succeeds even remotely like this?
Steve Jobs...
Jake Bagger That’s not a lot of people.
Apple fan without reading comprehension; shocking.
Bill Gates
metalpachuramon
Most tech giants from the 80-00's
I remember when Wang, Compaq and Commodore were the nascent stars of the computer world.
Mercury
Damn and i was feeling old. Thanks for that
Who was the first computer programmer?
A- Eve
She had an Apple in one hand and a Wang in the other.
What happened with Commodore was Jack Tramiel retired and an extremely left wing Professor from Berkely took it over whom taught his classes how evil capitalism is. So what he did was made the Commodore Plus 4 which had NO Peripherals or software. Stores were left with them they couldn't sell or return.
I remember when Kaypro was the cutting edge "laptop".
The quality of their hardware and customer service dipped so abruptly it was astounding. I was working for an all Dell company at the time and within 2 years we switched out every PC with an HP.
Dell started hiring people straight out of college for administrative jobs and even had to create a hotline just for them for simple issues like they forgot to plug in their computer and when they were pushing the power button it wouldn't turn on so we sent out techs and they almost always called us back laughing that these high paid geniuses didn't know the first thing about computers. Their designers were the same so you literally had people who didn't know the first thing about computers either designing them or telling the designers what to do. Do you remember the capacitor issue? They were buying the damn things in bulk for less than a cent each and thought they were saving a fortune but then all the calls started coming in and like you said, it started abruptly when they instituted new hiring practices to hire out of college and put them in administrative positions with no experience and often no knowledge of what they were doing as most were in college to learn marketing, not computers and Dell was putting them in charge over everything beginning with incentives then President Clinton helped to create to get employers to hire more college students out of college... by the time I hired on there were mistakes happening everywhere and then came the big capacitor fiasco they wouldn't listen to anyone about and like you said, almost immediately everything crashed abruptly. They just would not listen to anyone until Michael Dell took back over and fired a bunch of them but by then it was too late as all of their bad policies and arrogance had ruined the company's name and they lost a lot of business where no one will ever trust the Dell name again and any hint it's a Dell even in a different box and they will not buy it.
"Dude! You're getting a Dell!" I love quoting silly and overplayed commercials. Truly timeless comedy
You sound bitter.
@@atheismcrew1524 ?
No, it's VERY dated and that's what makes it funny. 😭 Love that nostalgia!
What happened? Simple they forgot the real meaning of the word CUSTOMER SERVICE.
Absolutely right. I don't think they ever looked at Customer Service as a support feature. They always saw it and acted on it as a way to make serious money.
@@charlesmcgehee3227 Dell has excellent no questions asked support in my opinion. They overnighted a FedEx box after I broke my 24" ebay used monitor and I had a replacement the next day after the incident. Granted it still had warranty.
@@charlesmcgehee3227 It was a used monitor I bought from someone on eBay and I broke it swinging a broom stick. I contacted Dell and got a new replacement. Dell and Lenovo have excellent customer service especially considering that Apple's is the worst in the business. Even when it is out of warranty they charge you a reasonable price to fix it. TBH I have no idea why people are complaining.
EXACTLY.
i feel like it wasn't customer service and you're just whining
Greetings from someone who is commenting from a Dell laptop.
I feel like this needs an update, a ton has happened since 2018 and very much directly in the way of what this video says back then.
Dell sucks even more now
@@ericsanchez2774 So insightful, who can argue with that logic?
I have owned a couple of Dell computers over the years. They used to be good and one day I went to buy another, but their website insisted on me purchasing bundled software, which I did not want (there was no way to buy the computer without the software), hence I spent my £1500 elsewhere 😉
Yep - this has been a problem for many years, especially in the corporate market where the recipient of the machine is the tech support person who has to uninstall the bundled software. On balance, and comparing with bundled software and poor drivers from other machines, I still prefer Dell. But the gap is closing...
I have never seen Dell require purchasing any bundled software. I'd like to know what bundled software you are referring to.
That's a strange thing to say. Go onto literally any Dell product page, hit configure, and there's always some antivirus or MS Office trial that cannot be removed. If you call up an account manager they also cannot remove it. In 10 years of buying approx 20 machines per year, I've never had one without bundled software.
To answer your question though, see this product page. First one I found on the website. MS Office trial pre-installed: e.g. www.dell.com/en-uk/work/shop/desktop-and-all-in-one-pcs/optiplex-5260-all-in-one/spd/optiplex-5260-aio/n027o5260aio
You do not pay for the bundled trial software. It can be removed. I found HP to be much worse for shovelware. I had an HP netbook for a few months. The shovelware was unusable because of the limited screen resolution. Installing OEM Win7 in place of the supplied version got rid of the shovelware, at a cost, but didn't solve the instability problem. The machine used to lock up requiring pulling the battery to restart. Installing Linux didn't help either. Complete rubbish.