Tag Archive for 'Dell'

A plea to Andy Lark….

Published by Ben Kepes on June 10, 2008 in Design, Efficiency, IT and Manufacturing. 1 Comment

Andy Lark is VP marketing at Dell and a Kiwi boy to boot. He’s also a nice guy and tends to listen to what people say. So here goes…

We’re needing a new desktop for one of our CSRs here so I went to the Dell site to customise one. We need a few extra things that the Dell custom system builder won’t do so I decided to call Dell direct to discuss… big mistake!

On my first call I got as far as telling the rep my name before being disconnected - not bad, I’d only been on hold for five minutes or so.

On my second call the rep took my name and phone number (in case I got cut off!) and transferred me to someone who could help. I explained the situation and was promplty cut off.

On the third attempt I sat in “on-hold” land for 20 minutes before giving up.

Fourth time I got onto someone who agreed to take my phone number - it took 4 attempts before they understood what I was saying. At the end of that they ended up transferring me anyway where I was promptly disconnected.

The common theme to all of these calls is that they all sounded like I was talking to someone sitting underwater, speaking through a diving mask and transferring from Timbuktoo via a 14.4Kbps dial up line - no actually the call quality was worse than that!

I finally got through to Vicky (DDI frm NZ 0800 775 771 xtn 32610 for those who need to contact her). She was really helpful and promised someone who could sort me out would call me back n a couple of hours.

All that aside - Andy can you please convince Michael to budget for an upgrade in Telco carriers this year - your current system really sucks.

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XP till 2012?

Published by Ben Kepes on April 23, 2008 in Design and IT. 0 Comments

Not sure if this is legit or not (care to comment Andy Lark?) but reports say that Dell will continue offering Win XP way past Microsoft’s cut off date. Seems user demand will have XP offered on high end Dell business machines - so the consumers get the “top shelf” product that is claimed to be better and stronger.

Hmmm - not sure if I concur with MS’s self-analysis!

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“Word of Mouse” will drive adoption of SaaS

Published by TroyWing on February 12, 2008 in IT, SaaS and Web x.0. 0 Comments

Recently, I attended the Small Business Summit hosted in Times Square, New York. The catchphrase of the summit was ‘Technology: Its time to reinvent your business’
The key note speaker was Karen Quintos of Dell Inc, VP of Marketing , Small and Medium Business and in a superb presentation she put up some very interesting stats. Globally, 7 users connect to the Internet for the first time every second which is 500,000 users a day and around 180 Million a year, its a phenomenal rate, places like China,Brazil and India are significant contributors to this figure.

(BTW, Dell considers SMB to be 1 to 500 employees, but they further divide that up into 1-20 employees, 20 to 100 and 100 to 500 marketing groups).

She also discussed in detail how her approach to marketing to SMB’s was driven by the more than  significant shift from traditional marketing channels to new media. Her research figures show that below the age of 35 mark,
consumers and business owners are unsurprisingly now more influenced by Web 2.0 type marketing rather than traditional advertising and word of mouth. The phrase she used to describe this was “Word of Mouse”, more people under age 35 are making purchasing decisions based upon blogs, social networking, internet searching and forums than any other means.

Another interesting point by Karen, What is the number one problem that Dell has encountered with small business?… Data Security and backups, which leads to the common theme  of this summit. The repeated call from various speakers for Small Business to outsource business functions that needed to be outsourced. When you don’t have the skill sets or budget inhouse to setup and support a function, allow experts to do manage it for you.

Is it me or does this all point to SaaS being the answer? It sounds to me that the Small and Medium Business market is ripe for a big SaaS adoption push in 2008 and 09, not only are business problems resolved by SaaS but the entrepreneurs of the younger generation are mentally ready for this. This isn’t a just speculation, the market research trends indicate this and the expert speakers at this summit were unanimous in their recommendations for utilizing technology to “reinvent your business”.

Not only is this encouraging for Saas vendors, but it points the way to how you should market your products to small business, utilize the network effects of new media.

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