From: mccall@mksol.dseg.ti.com (fred j mccall 575-3539)
Subject: Re: >>An example of Dell's product support (Esix here I come...)
Organization: Texas Instruments, Inc
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 03:48:56 GMT

In article <+mfm04=@dixie.com> jgd@dixie.com (John De Armond) writes:
>donn@dellunix.dell.com (Donn Baumgartner) writes:
>
>>I have taken a lot of heat here for expressing my personal opinion of
>>various people's use of the net.  So be it.  But it's my *personal* opinion
>>only, not Dell's (as if that wasn't clear already).  Dell does not approve.
>
>Riiight.  What Dell needs to do right now is to fire your ass,
>make that fact publicly known and appologize to Stan for the
>corporate attitude  expressed.  That would certainly satisfy me.

Given your attitude from what I've seen here, if I were Dell I
wouldn't be particularly concerned about 'satisfying' you.  Who do you
think you are, Jerry Pournelle?

>If Stan had been told "We don't know what the problem is but
>we're working on it and will keep you aprised of the  progress" - 
>and done so -, I can bet he would have been satisfied.  I  KNOW
>I would have.  

And what if they're not working on it because it is a KNOWN
incompatibility?  What if the user doesn't find that acceptable and
decides to try to resort to a little net.blackmail?

>
>Now to the Dell side.  Even though I no longer actively pursue consulting
>work, I still take care of a few old clients.  I dropped by a client
>this morning on the way to another appointment.  I handed him a
>printout of Donn's remarks.  You see, he is opening another store and
>was considering buying Dell turnkey Unix systems - at my suggestion - 
>instead of more clones and ISC as we'd done in the past.  I had suggested
>Dell primarily because I no longer had the time to fight ISC wars
>to make things work so factory support would have been useful.  My new
>advice was to call both HP and Sun and see what they have to say.

Well, there's disservice #1 to the folks you're acting as a consultant
for.  You're obviously making your decisions about what you do and
don't recommend for all the wrong reasons.

>
>I've chatted for the last few days on our local ham radio repeater 
>about this incident.  Our repeater was built so that several
>dozen of us PC Unix whizzards who are also hams would have a place
>to swap notes and generally talk geek things.  From the response 
>another merchant friend of mine has had at the mere mention of
>a good deal, I suspect there are as many as 50 additional 
>people who either lurk and don't talk or listen in on scanners.
>Several of us had contemplated Dell as an alternative to ISC in order
>to get some support.  I think that issue is resolved.  At least with
>ISC, a posting here or some carefully addressed Email will usually
>result in the answer.

I can't speak for your friend, but I haven't had any problems with
Dell support, and I don't even own any Dell hardware (or software -
yet).  More net.blackmail, I guess.

>
>Finally I've been sitting for a couple of months on an invitation to write
>a guest editorial on customer service in another magazine.  I plan to 
>contrast good and bad support.  Every time I thought I had the worst
>possible example of customer support, something else has come up to
>superceed it.  Unless I see something from Dell to refute what Donn 
>has said here, I think I've found my bad example.

Gee, how interesting.  You want to bash a company for bad support
without having any experience at all with their support organization.
Which magazine is asking you to write for them?  I think I want to
write them a letter and suggest that they get someone else to write
that article, because you can't seem to get past your personal
relationships and biases.

-- 
"Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live
 in the real world."   -- Mary Shafer, NASA Ames Dryden
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Fred.McCall@dseg.ti.com - I don't speak for others and they don't speak for me.