Mike -
I am very familiar with Deming's work, I did a lot of JIT development for General Motors in the late 70's and early 80's and got drilled on quality relentlessly. Even more when we started working with the Japanese (Kamatsu especially) who regarded Deming's work as the bible.
Quality of construction, accuracy of configuration, and general attention to the customer's out-of-box experience are areas where DELL has no peer.
But that does not change the inherent MTBF of the components used - there will be a certain number of failures per thousand boxes shipped no matter how well the QC is done. And it would cost more to build boxes that don't fail than to fix those problems - by a wide margin.
BTW that's what killed CPQ in 1991, and why Rod Cannion got fired. CPQ built a box which worked first time, every time, which could be dropped 10 feet off a dock onto concrete and still run, which had gold flashed contacts and mil spec parts throughout. They were way more reliable than the competition and only about 50% more expensive.
Guess what - customers didn't care. They figured better to save $1000 and take a chance that they would be the ones with no problems. And their chances were pretty good. And the vendor would fix it if they lost.
This is not a new debate and the votes are already in.
But however you read that, and whether you agree with me or not, it has nothing to do with revenue from enterprise services, which have nothing to do with fixing PCs, or with PC quality, and only a little to do with PCs at all. |
