Sometimes I just don’t understand how corporate bigwigs think. Dell very well may have committed corporate suicide by concealing the fact that they knowingly used defective parts in their Optiplex line of computers.  In fact, according to reporter Ashlee Vance in the New York Times, an internal study of its Optiplex line of business computers stated, “Nichicon capacitors were expected to have a failure rate of 97 percent over three years.

Don’t these people understand that without customers, you don’t have a business?

I can understand the necessity of making decisions to use a lower quality component to be competitive. But using defective parts …

Screwing your customers will not make them loyal nor will it make them buy anything else from you in the future. In fact it will have exactly the opposite effect.  With faulty capacitors, even if the user kept all their drivers up to date, and performed all of the recommended maintenance, these machines were going to fail.

To add insult to injury, Dell basically refused to fix them when they failed. I can guarantee you that I will never buy anything else from Dell. It should be the customer’s decision if they are willing to accept lower quality to save money but no company should sell products they know are defective.

Whether or not Dell wins or loses the lawsuit it now faces doesn’t really matter. They have destroyed their reputation and lost the goodwill of the masses. Is this Dell’s death rattle?

Only time will tell.