DELL is sinking
"Mayday, Mayday", you can almost hear it coming from the Dell campus in Round Rock, TX and Michael Dell's house on Lake Austin. Every three to four months now there seems to be a layoff of some sort and the halls on the Dell campus' get quieter and quieter. The Dell campus' are becoming ghost towns. I am not sure on the numbers or anything, but on January 30th, 2009, many members of the "Dell Team" will be asked to give back their badges and leave work. Who is to blame for this? Is it Michael Dell's fault?
Now I don't want to give away my sources for any of this information, but let's just say that this is all pretty well deep inside the company. A few years back, a financial adviser was hired onto Dell and was asked to take a look at everything, and give feedback as to what to cut and what not to cut. The team that was assigned the, "impossible task" at Dell, quickly went to work and within a year, or maybe longer, presented a report to those in charge at Dell, to include Michael.
The report was pretty specific as to what needed to be cut and what needed to be expanded on. According to the adviser, if things were done properly, Dell would be able to rise above HP and settle down as the world's leading computer manufacturer. In the end of it all, nothing got changed. The report was probably thrown into the recycle bin. The team was fired and business continued to operate, seemingly, the same way.
Those in charge at Dell are really gutting the company and soon there will be nothing left. What once started out as an American computer company that we could all be proud of, is now a bunch of contractors located overseas. The companies fate is now in the hands of people who don't care one bit on the companies success. Left and right, jobs are being sent to Brazil, India and Ireland, from Dell. Austin is becoming a town for the unemployment.
To make matters worse, just recently we had President Obama swear into office. President Obama has made it clear that he will be taking from the rich corporations, like Dell, HP and Microsoft, by increasing taxes. These tax increases are also being directed towards companies that have outsourced to overseas companies. What do you think Dell is doing with that news? Well, put it this way, Dell has no plan to bring back these jobs to the United States. Matter of fact, Dell is working on sending most of the jobs, overseas. The jobs are created and started at the Dell campuses in Austin. The jobs get perfected and properly documented, then Dell employees travel overseas and train people on that job. Crazy huh!
To make matters worse, the company has no clue what it is going to do next. They have reported that they are going to close the Ireland sites in the middle of 2009. This is huge, because a lot of Dell business and servers are hosted in Ireland. Some business processes are going to be just trash canned.
Staff Management is the Human Relations company that Dell hired out. The company has been known, very well, to simply pick from a hat full of people and just start letting them go. Staff Management does not care about the activities of the company or the mission of the company, they just simply hire and fire people according to a budget they are given. There people to people skills lack heart and personality. It is my belief that this is one of the number one problems at Dell. Would you want a company that does not care about the bottom line, to be hiring your employees and firing?
I knew one of Dell's lead Linux gurus. He had been at Dell for a numerous number of years, and had a good standing record with Dell. He had two parents die and requested emergency leave to take care of everything and to mourn. His manager told him to take as much time as he needs, even suggested a month off. So that is what he did, he took off a month. Two days before he planned to return, he got a call from HR, who said, "Don't come back to work. You are no longer needed at Dell." The manager has no clue that HR made this decision, nor would HR reverse the decision. Less than 12 hours later, the Linux guru received a call from HP and was offered a job that he could not refuse. So why is Dell failing? Hmmmmmm...
I could go on and on about this topic. This hits home pretty well with me. If it wasn't for Dell being located in Austin, I would actually hope that the company would die, but I actually do like the idea of Dell. It used to be an awesome company, but then a massive amount of mistakes were made. PLEASE WAKE UP DELL, get your head on straight!
