Dell Wastes No Time

Barely two weeks after Michael Dell stepped back into the CEO role, Dell has launched Dell Idea Storm. It's a Digg-like website for customers to suggest and vote on ideas for upcoming Dell systems. Not surprisingly, the top suggestion is to have a Dell machine without all the crapware from AOL, McAfee, Google, etc. Customers just want the computer with the OS installed. Shocking.

Part of my reason for switching to a Mac last year was because I didn't want to invest to time to do a clean install of Windows XP. By buying a PowerBook (and later MacBook), I got a machine that was not infested and bloated with software I didn't want and would never use.

Anyway, Idea Storm is brilliant. Dell gets in touch with its customers, allowing them to suggest and vote on upcoming features. Asking your customers what they want - why don't other hardware manufacturers do this? Then we might actually get a laptop whose battery life doesn't degrade to an hour after 6 month's use.