DELL & AOL showing signs of Desperation!
AOL is bundling 1 year free online unlimited service with every new DELL computer being sold. I assume this is to compete with MSN's free 6 month deal for anyone on any computer. AOL is also signing up 1 month members without a credit card. AOL had to pay DELL an awful lot to bump out DELL's own Dell.Net ISP Service that it is working hard to build up here and in Europe. AOL is acting very desperate here.
DELL may be getting ahead of itself as well with it OS offerrings. Right now you can get Win'98se, or Win'2K, or Win'Millineum on a new computer. Few other box makers are offerring this many OS's to the configure it yourself market. Most of them are smart enough to know that getting component that work correctly under Win'2K is very tricky, so most have opted to offer only narrowly configured computers. I suspect DELL is in big trouble here. They may lack the component and personal training to reliably offer such a wide range of components and OS's.
Case in Point: I ordered an Inspiron 7500 with Win'2K and the CDRW Drive (instead of DVD or CD) During the ordering process there was considerable confusion on DELL's end whether I could combine the two. Once I confirmed from them that I could, I placed the order. That was 3 weeks ago. Since then my Notebook has been sitting in "Production" and no one at Dell, after considerable effort, can tell me exactly what the hold up is. In the past, DELL would say, 'well, that 10mb Hard Drive is on back order, why don't you choose the 17mb one' and I would gladly do so, in order to expidite the order. Well, no more... now DELL does not even know what the hold up is in Production. So I suspect that Production has gotten ahead of itself, and simply can't reliably produce the paripheral/OS combinations that Sales promised it could. On several occasions, I've been asked to simply cancel the order if I don't want to wait. Can you believe this? I'm being encouraged to cancel a $4,000 notebook instead of being given the opportunity to choose a different component to help them get my order out the door?
Something smells very fishy over at Dell these days, and it isn't the day old Coffee...
I think AOL shareholders are in for a shock when they learn that membership is slipping. Many back to school students learn they can't run the 32bit versions of AOL on their campus TCP/IP networks, so they simply drop or downgrade their memberships. Yet another drain on membership revenue that few have noticed. |
