Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Dell Dive

Annoyed that Dell went private today.

I had purchased a small lot of 10 shares in 2003 and so they did a force sale today for less than half of what I paid for them.

We have a Dell downstairs that mostly these days just runs iTunes and Dropbox and from time-to-time Chrome but it's a solid machine that's been running almost non-stop for 13 years now (except during our many power outages), got it shortly after we got married.  Once the hard drive got corrupted and we had to rebuild it but otherwise it's been solid for all that time.  Started with Windows 98 and then 98SE so we could add a scanner and finally Windows XP (skipped ME, of course).  Added Firewire (for a Hi8 video camera we bought just before everything went digital - expensive camera gathering dust - sigh) and added an extra 300MB hard drive to store all of our photos and music which we back up regularly to an external hard drive as well.  Workhorse of a machine.  Played a lot of SimCity on that back before we had children.

The Dell I have at work, though, probably from 2011 or 2012 is such a horrible piece of junk that it was the reason I finally switched to a Mac at work.

Maybe if Dell had been making machines in 2011 with the same quality as their 2001 machines they wouldn't have tanked so bad they had to go private.  Or maybe no one would have bought new ones and they would have gone out of business sooner from being too good.

Or maybe now that they've gone private they can turn their eyes back to a focus of quality.

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