Dell responds to latest capacitor-related fallout, ignores the whole lying to consumers part
The "capacitor plague" issue of the early 2000's has started to resurface, not thanks to another batch of bogus orange-hued electrolytes popping free, but this time thanks to the release of documents relating to a three year-old Dell lawsuit. As we reported earlier this week, those docs show that Dell asked customer service reps to deny there was any problem with their motherboards, telling them to pretend they'd never heard about the issue and to "emphasize uncertainty." Now, Dell is responding to the latest flare up -- sort of.
A post on the Direct2Dell blog reiterates that this was an industry-wide issue, which it was, but more or less ignores the crux of this latest report: those internal memos telling CSRs to play stupid while corporate IT departments panicked as OptiPlex desktops died left and right. (Boxes manufactured during those troublesome years would ultimately achieve an amazing 97 percent failure rate.) Dell also points out that AIT, the company that raised this particular lawsuit, was improperly using its OptiPlex machines as servers and not as mere desktops. That sounds an awful lot like sour grapes to us -- or should we say sour electrolytes?