DELL UPDATE:

It took them all of a day to delete my post! But no worries, there are still over 100 others that all say the same thing, and more are getting posted daily. For anyone who's interested, Morton Topfer was formerly the lead advisor of quality and manufacturing at Dell. He shared the office of Dell CEO with Michael Dell and Kevin Rollins. In fact, if memory serves me correctly, he was referred to in a Business 2.0 article as the genius behind Dell's continuing high standards of quality. He now sits on the Dell board of directors.

Not that I'm advocating that you should bother such busy and important people as the members of the Dell board, certainly not by writing a polite, well worded letter of complaint, but I can tell you that Morton Topfer is the name of the man whose reputation was once synonymous with Dell quality. From what's you can find Google, he seems like a genuinely good human being - he even gives generously to education and philathropic causes. He might be interested to hear how far it's gone downhill since he moved on.

Even if I had his email address, it probably wouldn't be right to publish it, but... it would probably be OK to tell you that the Dell email system formats addresses like this: Firstname_Lastname@dell.com. Morton Topfer. Former co-CEO. I bet his Dell email address is still active.

posted by Lorna Brown at 11:38 PM