Open letter to Mr Dell ... (serious joke !)

OPEN LETTER TO MR. DELL

A real ‘french expérience’ from a frustrated customer…
Reference : Order n° 559332476 - 06 may 2008

Dear Mr Dell,

I would be much honored you took a minute or two to read my very personal french Dell customer experience. May this help you understand that final customer advice frequently lies in very subtle details.

I’ve recently ‘naïvely’ purchased an XPS1330 laptop computer from Dell France; running your only Dell ‘proposed’ OS for that machine : Windows Vista or nothing.

After installing my regular applications on my brand new laptop, I made my mind (quite rapidly though) that some of my top strategic apps would definitely never work on Vista (or at least, at the expense of too much efforts googling, phoning, hot-lining, writing, mailing etc).
I phoned your support team, but the only answer I got was “Dear Mr Nader, every purchaser of a Dell computer should ensure beforehand that the ordered system fulfills his needs”. Gotcha, that’s the rules. Offenders, please pass your way !

You are required to accept Vista, and you’re nothing else than number 1,567,654,111 (forced) Vista sale. No other choice.

Let me tell you, Mr Dell, this is a major customer frustration. I was staying quietly on the Microsoft side, just asking to go at my own pace keeping WinXP, letting others absorb the Vista too many quirks. Did’nt even dare asking you to install Linux on that machine.

Finally, in a desperate move to get my laptop working, I decided to re-install a brand new, fresh and clean Windows XP system (oh, my kind, my beautiful, my faithful Windows XP). This was of course in full disapproval with your tech support that stated…. “Oh non Monsieur, ne faites pas cela, Windows XP n’est pas supporté par Dell sur cette machine”. I translate it for you … “Oh, don’t do that sir, Windows XP is not supported on XPS1330 computers”.
As you already guess; I hate the “Don’t do that”. No problem, one hour later, done it anyway without your official consent. Hard drive reformatted, XP re-installed, all apps working well.

However, success was not complete…. one little sound driver (a thiny thiny one) desperately refused to install. While all others did, yes, you heard me right, I said ALL others (webcam, cd-drive, graphic card, cpu, disk, fingerprint, trackpad, etc…), obtained through internet (but of course, not at Dell that does not support WinXP!) worked damned perfectly right.

Result : no videos, no jokes, no mp3, no dvd’s, no skype, no … , no system beeps, and more and more and more. A single sound driver, just that damned sound driver and my laptop was lacking today’s most important feature : audition ! Don’t tell me you missed it or I won’t believe you ! “.

As a matter of fact, you obviously won :
• one more Vista sale (yes Mr Dell, look at your 4 desk aligned flat screen daily stats – 101.597 Vista sales today, and I’m the 101.598th (even though I trashed it to bin upon delivery, you won’t care– it’s a sale)
• one more enraging customer from so little Dell consideration.

So, Dear Mr Dell, as a final moral to that (what I’d like to be amusing) story, I would very very much like you to explain: “Why have you decided to lockdown your customers to Vista if not in a deliberate Microsoft hand in hand move to increase their marketshare with their new bloated operating system everyone fears”

Oh, I think I got the answer. In France, my pretty poor story is the consequence of what we call “Abus de position dominante”. In english, it translates to “abuse of dominant position” or whatever. (let’s put it simple, this is T.R.U.S.T)… Microsoft have been heavily fined (is heavily enough ?) by the European Commission for such practices. Are your own practices helping Big Bill to bypass these measures ?

By the way, should you know of anybody at Dell or Microsoft happening to own a WinXP Sound card driver running on your XPS1330 machine, please, be nice... email it to me !

Sincerely yours,

Cram Redan

 

great job mate!.

Its good to see someone put so much time into something that Mr. dell isn't even going to read lol but anyway good job.

 

Your French isn't actually grammatically correct.

So yeah, it's a slightly funny letter, but the poor French just makes it awkward.

 

So...what are these 'top strategic apps' that you are certain won't work in Vista? You know that with SP1 now released, Vista is a pretty good application, and its compatibility features are pretty effective.

 

Please do not double post. You have already posted this on the Dell forums.

 

I'm actually surprised that a system like the XPS1330 didn't cut it, considering its components are more than enough for Vista.

Curious question, how much RAM did you get installed?

 

Is this thread supposed to be some kind of pointless ranting? The guy has already made 2 posts, which the other thread is probably the same subject I saw.

 

It is a pretty light rant, all said. I just want to know what it has to do with the gaming subforum. Are these the "top strategic apps?"

 

Hmm yeah... I wonder what is he going to do next?

 

hmmmm, might be off topic, but wasnt dell fined LOADS the other week for the thing the guys complaining about, im sure they were

 

Good point, seems like I failed to notice that this was a cross post. Continue discussion here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=256121