The Decline of Dell...What Happened?

When I graduated high school in 2002, as a graduation gift my dad got me a Dell Dimension tower for my upcoming college term. You best believe as soon as I unwrapped it and the Dell logo on the box was uncovered, my grandpa, always the comedian, shouted, "Dude, you just got a Dell!"

Why not title this video "What the Dell happened?"

Just imagine being Michael Dell's roommate in college, watching him make $6 million in sales in his first year in college. He was probably like, "bruh."

It's just one anecdote, but when I recently ordered a Dell online, the sales rep emailed me a highly inaccurate transcript of our dialogue, the computer I received was defective, and the tech support person was shockingly ignorant. I had no choice but to return the computer and buy a different brand. Dude, I didn't get a Dell.

I feel bad for Dell. In 2010 they came out with a 5" phablet called Dell Streak. Nobody bought it and critics said it was too big. Fast forward to 2015 and now EVERYONE is using phones at or near 5", while people consider phablets to be 6" to 8"and they are also pretty popular. Dell was ahead of it's time.

I remember when their ad guy got busted for smoking pot and the running joke became, “Dude, you’re getting a cell!”

I was a retail sales manager for Dell back in 2005-2006ish. The fact that when customers, and employees, had to call for support they had outrageous wait times and could barely understand the outsourced personnel definitely contributed to people's reluctance to buy Dell.

I remember working for Dell back in 2004 - 2007.. they started me at 33k / year for taking calls on the phone.. over the course of 2 yrs I was given some raises and bonus but they were small.. after a certain point they just stopped .. I worked for almost 2 yrs with no raise in pay and they would literally bring in people that used to work at McDonald's, put them in some 4 week fast paced training course, and then land them on the phones, I ended up training a good chunk of them because they had no idea how to troubleshoot or diagnose hardware problems. Anyone can read a script but walking a 70 yr old over the phone into reinstalling Windows XP or swapping out a hard drive you gotta be somewhat savvy with people.

Remember Gateway in the cow print boxes?

You should do Gateway next. That company fell even harder i think

I must be living in an alternate universe. I remember everyone in grad school having either a Dell XPS or a MacBook. HP a distant third. This was 2017-2020. Had no idea Dell was having issues...

I work for a company’s IT department and all we use is Dell. Laptops, desktops, servers, switches, you name it. Most of the time, they work very well. I’m using a Precision 7760 and it’s a pretty good computer. It has some small QC issues (space bar and shift key is squeaky) but beyond that it’s a solid piece of hardware. I’ve been impressed with them and I work with their stuff every day.

"You can tell...its a Dell" been a staple of describing toasters and potatoes everywhere

I didn't even realize Dell had a decline. I'm watching this on my Dell Inspiron.

My parents bought a Dell back in like 2002/2003, and it was such an amazing computer compared to what we had before. I still have and occasionally use the monitor for it. We named it, "Dude, it's our Dell."

The accounting scandal, which you "didn't want to talk about," was very important because it showed that the company wasn't doing nearly as well as it wanted Wall Street to think.

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The rise of company man.

My first computer was a Dell Dimension 4600 that I ordered in 2004. It was a great machine and I never had any problems with it. It could do just about anything I wanted with it at the time. It was such a good machine that I ordered a replacement six years later because the Dimension became obsolete. My second computer was a Dell Studio XPS 9100. When fully upgraded, it was a beast of a machine. What turned me off of Dell was their customer service. They outsourced it overseas and that's where their customer service went to crap. I liked that for a time, Dell had customer service representatives that could actually speak English, not half English speaking people located in India. They would probably still have me as a customer if they kept their customer service department here in the US where it belongs.

I would say they’re going pretty downhill in the tower market due to the increasing popularity of custom pcs but dell still rules the laptop market. This year’s xps 15 is an absolute game-changer