Poor Dell

A whil ago Dell released a new website called IdeaStorm, allowing anyone to contribute ideas with other users voting on the ones they like.

They made one terrible and expensive mistake, and the results are likely to make you ache with laughter.

The mistake

Dell forgot to limit IdeaStorm to just their customers! They allowed and still allow open registration.

In and of itself that isn’t particularly bad, but when you’re one of the world’s biggest pc manufacturers and you’re taking ideas in a digg-style site, all the silly little retards come along with their ideas and logic-defying justification that wouldn’t even make sense drunk.

The suggestions

These are the current popular suggestions. In some cases they contrast quite sharply with themselves and some good ideas get dwarfed by the votes of assloads of teenagers demanding to be heard when they have no buying power and more importantly, nothing to say.

Most of the popular suggestions can be broken down into 3 categories: Give us open source software / operating systems, give us no software / operating systems, and hardware.

1. Pre-install Open Office and a bunch of other crap
   106,793 retards think Dell should pre-install even more stuff on people’s computers.Not just Open Office, but Firefox, Thunderbird, GAIM, PDF Creator, Scribus, Inkscape , GIMP, Audacity, VLC, Stellarium and Celestia.

   12 *more* applications, in addition to the crapware Dell already bundles.

   MS Office is not particularly cheap, but it is particularly industry standard, powerful and featureful. Open Office is good but it’s not as good.

   As an alternative to Microsoft Works, which blows, it’s a great idea. As an alternative to Microsoft Office, it’s stupid sorry.

   Firefox is a stupid idea but I’ll cover that shortly.

2. Have Firefox pre-installed as the default browser
   88,503 idiots want this. Oh yes, please do. It would be too hilarious not to – if you have any sense of humour at all you’ll do this Dell!Until the Mozilla Corporation pull their well funded fingers out of their well rounded asses and actually fix their browser, this is a retarded idea.

   Firefox is over 4 years old. It is unacceptable for an application to be so buggy, unstable and mind-boggingly resource intensive. Mozilla’s biggest achievement isn’t Firefox, it’s convincing retards everywhere that such awful code is acceptable.

   Dell can’t pre-install it and make it the default browser. They undoubtably test everything they put on their computers, and that’s going to undoubtably show intermittent crashing, memory leaks, profile corrupting and sluggish performance on some percentage of their computers.

   On a system with 256 or 512mb of memory, both of which Dell provide to consumers, Firefox could best be described as “crippling”.

   The justification for this suggestion is reason enough to avoid it -
   “Firefox OWNZ everything else. Plain and simple. I love firefox, IE7 is pathetic in comparison, it’s attempt at tabbed browsing blows.”, says some dick.

   Another retard explains how Firefox is “exciting” because it does more without “feature bloat”. Opera does more out of the box, faster, lighter and their quality assurance actually does their job, unlike Asa “Watch me Embarass Myself” Dotzler. For a giggle read this post – he says “Firefox on Mac just doesn’t work as well as Firefox on Windows”, neatly omitting that it’s his job to make sure it *does*.

3. No extra software option
   77,628 people think this is a good idea and so do I, but it kind of constrast sharply with the previous two.
4. Student discounts
   By all means, give students a discount. Unfortunately only 13,403 people support this real and valuable suggestion.Some people argue that it’s already available in the USA – but um, there’s kind of 96% of the world “outside” the USA.
5. Pre-installed Linux
   This is the big one. 140,839 kids managed to register and create the illusion of actual market demand for Linux.Dell is going to trial this soon, offering Ubuntu on some of their home/smb desktops.It slipped the attention of these users that Dell has offered RedHat on workstations for years, or it was unacceptable to them because that’s a “commercial” version of Linux?

   Some of the realists posting comments suggested just a “no OS” version that doesn’t limit people to a specific distro, while others wandered off into some fantasy land where consumers might want to dual boot. Most consumers can barely handle single-booting.

   The Ubuntu fans won the day and Dell is going to make Ubuntu available on a few of their products – the question remains though – is anyone going to buy it?

   I doubt it. There’s a difference between a 16 year old Microsoft-hater registering on a site so they can vote for Linux, and someone who say, has a job and buys stuff like computers.

6. Pre-installed software must be optional
   Unfortunately only 26,524 people supported this idea although it’s under consideration.Personally I think no software, as opposed to the somewhat more popular “craploads more software” is a great idea.Last year I dropped a couple of grand on a new HP desktop, which took 2 fucking hours to remove all the crap.
7. Provide Linux drivers
   60,377 people voted for this and it’s a sound idea, except Dell doesn’t actually make the hardware. They possibly have enough clout to force hardware manufacturers to release drivers.
8. Sell Linux PC’s woldwide
   Since only 4% of the world’s population is in the United States, it makes sense to at least target the entire possible market if you’re going to do something.Only 6950 people supported this idea.
9. LinuxBIOS instead of proprietry bios32,106 people voted for this idea. I’m not sure what difference it actually makes, someone mentioned better support for virtualisation which sounds cool.
10. More RAM
    34,169 people think 512mb of ram isn’t enough for the base memory anymore. It probably isn’t anymore.There’s two sides of the argument – the RAM can already be increased during the configuration process, and increasing the minimum will bump up the price.Both are valid. I’m capable of clicking the option to have more, others won’t know what that means or why they should.
11. Don’t elimated XP just yet
    20,470 people must have heard the rule of thumb – don’t get an OS until the OS gets a service pack!There’s nothing wrong with early adoption, but the chances of a bumpy ride are higher than 6 – 12 months later when 300 things have been patched.
12. No OS pre-installed
    I’m not sure how 140,000 people can demand Linux when 80,000 of the same people don’t want an operating system installed at all.One of the common trends in the OS-related ideas is the notion people will save money by not “buying” Windows. The ironic thing is Windows is “given” to you because the bundled crapware covers the license cost and then some.
13. Silent / Quiet computers
    29,177 agree with this great idea. Better fans, sound dampening etc. Computers are too noisy.
14. Include software cd’s
    Only 4,030 people agreed with this one. Being able to reinstall the software you want and the operating system without the bundled bullshit is a good idea.
15. Become the open source OEM
    27,608 people think Dell should capture this tiny market, without realising it’s the hardware manufacturers they need to target.Having Dell sort through Linux-compatible hardware for you doesn’t really change that.