Dell’s Customers Tell Dell What They Want

In ZDNet’s Gear for Geeks, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes writes about Dell’s newly-launched IdeaStorm site, a site where users can make suggestions about products and features they’d like to see from Dell. “Some of the ideas are pretty obvious,” he writes, “and Dell could have found out what people wanted by doing a quick web search, but some of the other ideas are interesting and show how the PC industry is changing and how Dell’s business model is lagging behind what their customers want.”

What do Dell customers want? According to Kingsley-Hughes, they want:

1. Linux pre-installed. On the IdeaStorm site, this request has been promoted (think of promotion as being similar to “digging” on Digg or “upvoting” on Reddit) some 31,000 times.
2. OpenOffice pre-installed, either alongside or instead of Microsoft Office or Works. (Works is still available?)
3. An option to just get a machine, without any additional software.
4. 1GB RAM as the minimum offered with any machine.
5. End offshore tech support.
6. Stop installing additional “craplets” on top of the OS.

Links

• What Dell customers want – Linux, no craplets, more RAM, no offshored tech support
• Dell’s IdeaStorm site