Anonymous tech/biz blogger Below The Crowd, makes a couple of interesting points in relation to Dell.
First, the idea of using order times as a bellwether for the state of the computer biz:
The indicator is simple: If Dell (NasdaqGS:DELL) takes more than one week to complete a custom order on something with the parts fully in stock (per their website), business is pretty good. 4-7 days means business is OK, but not great. 1-3 days and it's pretty weak.
He makes some good points, although the downside is that if you seriously want to use this method to keep your thumb on the pulse of the computer business, you've got to buy a lot of computers.
Moving on, he then goes off on a tirade about what he deems disproportionately expensive memory upgrades:
For upgrading my system's puny 1GB 667Mhz memory to 4GB of 800MHz memory in 2 DIMMs Dell wants $550! Buying the same memory directly from Crucial costs $116. I saved a bit more by skipping the unnecessary ECC memory that Dell forces you into buying, and dropping my memory cost to under $100
Below the Crowd has a valid point, and I've noticed this when futzing with Dell's order configurator thingy. If customer service advocate RichardFromDELL is reading, I'd love to hear his perspective on this.
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