Dell, Inc. (DELL)

friendOfTrend (< 20) Submitted: 12/05/06 3:38 AM : Start Price: $27.10 DELL Score: 21.44

I've bought servers from Dell, IBM, and HP. In both sales and support, Dell (IMHO) comes up short compared to the other two, and has for years. They can't notify me when I need to renew maintenance contracts, or put the correct contact name on correspondence. I recently had an HP server come to the end of its initial 3-year maintenance, and I received both a letter (with MY name on it) as well as an email alerting me that it was time to renew. This may seem petty to someone outside the IT business, but to those of us on the inside, it's huge. Especially at a small or mid-sized company where the sysadmin likely wears many hats and has to keep track of many maintenance contracts.

In addition to Dell's incompetence in the area of service, their initial failure to offer servers with AMD's Opteron processor was a huge blunder. I'm sure they lost repeat business to IBM and HP due to that misstep, and I'll bet that those lost customers are going to stick with IBM and HP once they see their level of service improve. Dell may turn things around eventually, but I don't see it happening in the next 3 years.

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