Robert Redelmeier wrote:
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Robert Myers wrote in part:
Energy efficiency is the new wild card. It's the only consideration
I can imagine that would justify cutting it so close.

Older problems, but perhaps related/continuing:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/te...gy/29dell.html


A long time before Dell's customer service problems and practices began
to get public attention, I had a long go-round with them that told me
everything I needed to know about the corporate culture there. I even
wrote about it in one of these forums, and Felger Carbon defended Dell
as not being the bottom-feeder I characterized it as being. I suspect
the (still unidentified) company that built the box causing the current
problem was the company that he would have claimed was the bottom feeder.

When I finally wrestled Dell to the mat, it turned out that there were
six hundred people ahead of me for the replacement part needed (so I had
to wait another six months for it), and the customer service rep had to
consult a manager before finally agreeing with me that there was
something wrong with the hardware, which manifested itself as a clear
data-corruption problem. The story reported in the New York Times
sounds very similar.

While it was still in the PC business, no IBM alum would ever comment on
the competitive landscape it faced in that market. As I infer the
corporate culture at IBM as it once was, they probably believed that
their corporate customers would wise up and stop buying the kind of junk
that was being sold at rock-bottom prices. History, of course, proved
otherwise.

As Yousuf pointed out earlier, it's quite a challenge to build a box at
a price that's competitive with what you can get from an OEM, and, even
then, although you know exactly who provided each part (at least in
theory), you can still wind up with a motherboard that becomes notorious
for having been built with bad capacitors.

If I had to finger a culprit here, I'd point at the business schools,
which seem to be so detached from reality that they actually think that
anything that looks good on a spreadsheet is a good business practice.
That anyone ever would have admired Dell just boggles my mind, just as
it boggles my mind that people *still* don't get why we are so much
poorer now than we were a few years ago. That is to say that, although
the PC business is cut-throat in a way that ultimately puts customers at
risk, it is not a problem that is peculiar to PC OEM's.

Robert.