Most of us have a vague sense that huge, multibillion-dollar companies have, like, systems in place to prevent them from making the sort of idiot mistakes that we, normal people, make. Not necessarily true!
Lucas Hinch, of Colorado Springs, was, as he explained to police, “fed up” with his 2012 Dell XPS 410. That shit was not working. On Monday, Hinch had finally had enough: he dragged his computer into an alley and shot it eight times.“It was glorious,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “Angels sung on high.”
Who can afford to be blasé about making money in this economy? A hot Web 2.0 startup, it turns out.
Dude, Russia's not getting a Dell. That's a polite version of what Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia's testy KGB agent turned autocrat, told Michael Dell in Davos. Dell's sin? After Putin delivered a fiery 40-minute sermon about the doom of the West, Dell asked if there was any way his company could help Russia…
This morning, I blogged that Dell had "unpublished" CTO Kevin Kettler from the company's executive staff page. Kettler had been planning to leave as part of a reorganization, but his sudden disappearance from the management headshots would indicate a food fight behind the scenes. Truth is, Dell had never put Kettler…
Wall Street types are worried because Michael Dell's company hasn't delivered the new music player that had been in the works for the holiday shopping season. The launch has been canceled, says an anonymous insider. That's the best news I've heard from Dell in a long time. Here's why.Competing with Apple on the iPod…
Call it Company (Red). Michael Dell is asking employees at his computer maker to take five unpaid days off and thus help the company trim costs instead of slashing jobs. Extorting your people by suggesting they take a small hit now as opposed to a larger hit later on isn't particularly original. “We’ve seen a slowdown…
In a briefing with journalists, Dell CEO confirmed the completion of his company's 8,500-people layoff. He was not demonstrably saddened, as is normal founder practice when discussing layoffs. But he did point out a recent IDC report showing Dell "outpacing" the rest of the PC industry. If Dell's falling stock price…
Most old software gets remaindered to the bargain bins. Not Windows XP, however. In June, Dell wangled a deal with Microsoft to let it install the older operating system for customers who didn't want Vista. In June, the companies charged $50 extra. According to this order page, XP now costs an extra $99 — on top of…
Marc Santora, the New York Times reporter who appears in ads for Dell's DigitalNomads site, says he received no compensation for the ad, which came from an interview Santora did for Big Think, a website backed by Facebook investor Peter Thiel. What appears to have happened: Dell or its ad agency, Federated Media,…
Where's the debt crisis in Silicon Valley? The knock-on effects are all too real, but frozen credit markets have had little direct effect on business operations, aside from possibly scotching the debt-fueled sales of Alltel and Nextel. That's because technology companies are run by paranoid sorts who like to keep…
Why is Marc Santora, a respected war correspondent for the New York Times, appearing in ads chattering about mobile technology? Click on the ad, running on sites like VentureBeat, and you're taken to a site, DigitalNomads, which appears to be a collection of blog-filler pablum about the wonders of the wireless…
Pride cometh before the fall, with Lehman Brothers having spent $309 million on information technology infrastructure in the quarter before the venerable financial firm went belly-up, which was up from $282 million the previous quarter. The company spent $1.1 billion on IT in 2007. Projects included a system for the…
Click to view"The company is seeing further softening in global end-user demand in the current quarter," a Dell spokesperson told Reuters on Tuesday. The news had company shares down over 10 percent an hour after this morning's market open. In August, Dell posted poor profits and said it planned to cut 8,500 jobs.…
"We Mean Business" is a new reality show that debuted on cable channel A&E over the weekend. Though "reality show" is somewhat of a misnomer. As the clip above makes clear, it's really just one long infomercial for its biggest sponsor, Dell. It stars former “Apprentice” winner Bill Rancic, who these days serve as…
A study of Fortune 500 and other companies found that one in three have bought the name, say, walmartsucks.com. But corporate attitudes toward hate sites vary widely between, say, Dell and Xerox:
Insiders have blabbed to the Wall Street Journal that Dell "has approached contract computer manufacturers with offers to sell ... its computer factories." Founder Michael Dell is a Texan, not a Valley guy. But he did build a $1,000 investment into the world's biggest PC maker, starting from his college dorm in…
A Citigroup analyst says "netbooks" — cheap mininotebook computers like the Asus Eee — will make up a third of all notebook sales in the future, and the majority of sales in developing nations. Michael Dell pitched his company's NetBook product line as something telcos could offer to customers for free, subsidizing…
