Dear Dell: You Can Ignore Me, But I Won't Go Away

I appear to have been banned from the new Dell one2one blog. It's not an oversight. I have submitted the same comment to the same post three times, both on the blog and via email, since last week. There are 54 comments -- including, to Dell's credit, many that are negative -- on the post about which I have commented, but mine is not included.

Don't you know by now, Dell, that ignoring a blogger won't make him or her go away?

Here's my comment, which doesn't seem particularly incendiary, originally submitted July 13,

Good to see that Dell is willing to address the customer service issue in this blog. No matter how great, or cheap your products are, without great customer service, they aren't worth buying. Dell used to be known for service, but that was a long time ago.

I am typing this at my Dell desktop. Because of the absolutely horrific experience I had with Dell customer service, I'd pretty much figured this was my last Dell. I'd love for you to convince me that my next computer should be my sixth Dell.

So does this post mean that Dell is once again interested in sales to the individuals and small businesses that built your business? Because that's not what Michael Dell announced last September.

On Thursday, Sept 29, 2005, -- the day i decided to buy a Lenovo instead of a Dell laptop, -- The New York Times reported that Michael Dell (himself) announced:
"Dell, which has beaten its competition by slicing profit margins and turning low-priced computers into a commodity, is now turning to the high end.... selling a line of desktop and laptop computers it is calling luxury models." The announcement said Dell "has assigned a sales force and customer service team to handle XPS customers." (In other words, those of us who weren't buying luxury models could stay in dell hell.)

Are you saying now that the rest of us slobs are going to get the benefit of this $100 million dollar service overhaul?

Saying it would be a start. Proving it would be what counts.

Although Dell's customer support may be lacking, that is not the real problem. The problem is the computer market in general.

Companies now are producing computers for so cheap, that bigger companies are forced to do what Dell did, cut back.

These other companies never had tech support, so its not a big deal for them, but companies like Dell are left in the dust because their once superior tech support team has gone, but if they had kept the support team, they would not be making money, or they would not be selling products.

There is no real solution here other than finding other ways to cut back. The most sensible to me would be finding cheaper parts, but they probably have already done that.