Make sale now; lose customer long-term
I put some extra RAM into a friend’s laptop over the weekend. A lame dog with 256Mb, it now runs like a dream with 1.2Gb.
I am flabbergasted that Dell would sell a Windows XP laptop with only 256Mb of RAM. Sure, that is Microsoft’s published minimum requirement for XP; which of course, is the barest minimum it will take for the operating system to start up.
“What do you mean you want to run stuff on top of the operating system?!”
This sort of practice is just stupid; classic short-term thinking at work. Surely there are smart people working for Dell who get this?
My said friend, who like many customers is not a tech guru, truly believed that Dell made crappy computers. She thought she should have bought another brand, and was actually contemplating doing so. The AU$79 (retail including GST), 1 minute with a screwdriver, RAM upgrade changed all that.
How many customers out there have bought similarly under-configured laptops from Dell? How many of these customers subsequent decide against buying Dells for their businesses, or recommend against them to their friends, all in the mistaken belief that Dell laptops are unusably slow?
Does the trend continue today with Vista PCs selling with only 512Mb of RAM?
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While I agree that Dell’s decision in this case is pretty dumb, buyers in any field needs to have some basic knowledge of what they’re buying. I wouldn’t expect a computer-buyer to know about memory dual-channeling or pipeline caches, but “amount of RAM” and “processor type and speed” are the two most basic of all computer specs.
Surely this is like choosing a car without knowing how many seats it has, or whether it’s 4- or 6-cylinder diesel or petrol.
Is the average consumer expected to know that the published minimum RAM requirement for running Windows is actually not sufficient for the machine to operate effectively?
I know we are talking about degrees here. Is it not appropriate to assume that when I buy a laptop for basic Internet and word processing, that it would have all the bits necessary for it to work effectively?
Is this like buying a 4-seater vehicle to run to the shops with and getting a TukTuk?
The deep question here is “How long does something have to be part of our culture before we’re expected to know about it?”
Computers are NOT new. Personal computers have been part of business culture for more than TWO DECADES. Anyone who says they don’t know anything about this has been ignoring the most important cultural development of our lives for more than 20 years!
That’s the time between being born and being a parent, or between the Korean War and the Arab-Israeli War of 1973.
Anyone who goes into the marketplace without knowing the basic minimums — or asking someone who does know — before making a purchase is, quite frankly, an idiot.
You ask whether this is about telling the difference between a 4-seat sedan and a tuktuk — well, what would you think of someone who now, in 2008, who couldn’t tell the difference between the two?