Dell, hoist by their own web 2.0 petard

[trochee]

Dell tried to pull some of the "you make the web" juice to itself by creating "Dell IdeaStorm", where users could submit their own suggestions for how Dell could do/sell things better.

Guess what: The overwhelmingly popular suggestions have been all about open-source and transparency: "Pre-Installed Linux", "Pre-Installed OpenOffice", "linux laptop", "Have Firefox pre-installed as default browser".

Now Dell is in the somewhat awkward (for them) situation of having to implement some of these ideas or face the egg-on-face of asking the crowd for suggestions and then refusing them all. Not that I'm complaining -- Dell has been in bed with the Microsoft "pre-packaged software" options for so long that their versions without Windows cost more than the versions with, since so much is subsidiszed by all the greyware "trial version" bloat software.

Interesting to note that Web 2.0, for all its hype, might actually have an impact on the behavior of big capital. Keep your fingers crossed.

(via the Ubuntu blog)
Additional note: LibraryThing has some data suggesting that non-commercial web 2.0 is more successful than commercial attempts [Amazon] to cash in on tagging. "Amazon's tagging suffers a failure of incentive."

Comments

[bwb-archive.livejournal.com]

Did anyone suggest actually making their laptops work?

Just wondering :)

[lunacow]

Thanks for pointing to that Web 2.0 video. That was very cool.

Dell and web 2.0

[richardatdell.livejournal.com]

Appreciate your perspective on Dell's Ideastorm and wanted to thank you for the feedback.

Think to suggest it is a petard might be a little overstated as we are investigating many of the ideas in terms of implementation.

Hope you will check back later today or early next week as we start to respond to some of the ideas. Other suggestions will take some time before we can provide feedback as we look at the suggestions.

Again, thanks for giving us your perspective. We appreciate hearing from you.

Re: Dell and web 2.0

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Hello richardatdell -- it's nice to see that there are people (like yourself) monitoring the response to the "Idea Storm".

I will be thrilled if Dell decides to start shipping with Linux versions without charging extra (or, conversely, starts offering discounted rates for those of us who don't want to pay the "Microsoft Tax"). In addition, Dell could stop colluding with Microsoft to make the MS tools the de facto standards by no longer installing IE/OE/MSOffice etc as the default software installations and offering the free (community-maintained, open-source) alternatives as easy options on ordering a new PC.

These two directions are the essence of the top seven suggestions on the Idea Storm. I don't know what it means to say "we are investigating many of the ideas in terms of implementation", and until then I will happily say that Dell is in a cleft stick of its own design.

Re: Dell and web 2.0

[richardatdell.livejournal.com]

I not only keep an eye on whats being said at IdeaStorm,I also visit blogs and engage in conversations about various issues related to Dell and technology or aspects of the technology business. These conversations are helpful to us in terms of learning and gaining insight or understanding from lots of different perspectives.

What I meant in terms of "we are investigating many of the ideas in terms of implementation" is that there are some 1680 ideas at IdeaStorm covering a whole range of initiatives for different parts of the business. We can't respond to all 1680 ideas in a few days or a week. We are looking at what is being posted and voted on. We will respond as we can. Watch the ideas in action part of the site for information

Re: Dell and web 2.0

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Despite all the effort Dell is making to get free marketing information from customers, the "ideas in action" part of the "Idea Storm" is rather weak:

• It's not part of the main "Idea Storm" web site -- in fact, the link leaves that website
• it fails to have an easy-to-remember URL (I note you didn't use it yourself): http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/ideastorm/ideasinaction?c=us&l=en&s=gen (the other URLs are things like: http://www.dellideastorm.com/popular , much easier to remember)
• it has no RSS feed (unlike the other pages on the "Idea Storm" website), so users are forced to re-visit that page frequently instead. Even a "sign up for notification on updates of this page" would be better.

My take-away here is that Dell doesn't really care about participating in its side of this conversation. But that's not what web 2.0 is about.
I suppose that you (richardatdell) might be Dell's response. But why isn't this conversation happening somewhere at the Dell website?

[chachachana.livejournal.com]

ha!