Yep. Dell.
I found this story in the NYTimes via Google News yesterday:
After the math department at the University of Texas noticed some of its Dell computers failing, Dell examined the machines. The company came up with an unusual reason for the computers’ demise: the school had overtaxed the machines by making them perform difficult math calculations.
Dell, however, had actually sent the university, in Austin, desktop PCs riddled with faulty electrical components that were leaking chemicals and causing the malfunctions. Dell sold millions of these computers from 2003 to 2005 to major companies like Wal-Mart and Wells Fargo, institutions like the Mayo Clinic and small businesses.
“The funny thing was that every one of them went bad at the same time,” said Greg Barry, the president of PointSolve, a technology services company near Philadelphia that had bought dozens. “It’s unheard-of, but Dell didn’t seem to recognize this as a problem at the time.” …
A study by Dell found that OptiPlex computers affected by the bad capacitors were expected to cause problems up to 97 percent of the time over a three-year period, according to the lawsuit.
Gee whiz, that sounds familiar.
At that time, we had a computer lab full of Dells at my school. And just after their 3-year warranty expired, the majority of computers in the lab failed, within a 2-month period. It was significantly evident that something was going wrong; we had 18 computers in the lab, and every week two or three different computers would fail in the exact same way. You turn on the PC and the fan goes into hurricane-force mode, the PC is frozen, and you cannot shut down short of unplugging the thing.
I asked our IT guy about it yesterday, but he just shook his head and said, “sho ga nai,” Japanese for “c’est la vie.” He didn’t think we could make anything of it. If it were me, I’d be calling Dell and saying, “hey, I just read this article and recalled all those computers you sold us which all failed at the same time in the same way.”
But then, in the U.S., they’re having to sue Dell over this, so Dell would not be likely to comp us anything willingly. Plus, this is Japan, so good luck suing anybody.
It would surprise no one reading this blog that I would long ago have switched our school to Macs had that been in any way my choice. But it’s not my choice, and to my dismay, the school is still, to this day, buying Dells. Not the smartest purchasing strategy, dude.
I’ve recently read that a lot of different brands use the same Taiwanese, Chinese, and Taiwanese owned and managed factories for the production of computers and computer parts.
This reading of mine stemmed from the suicides occuring at one very large Taiwanese owned production facility in China. That facility apparently produced parts for Dell, Compaq, and Apple, just to name a few.
I was particularly stunned by the rank exploitation of the workers at these facilities. They worked long hours and got meager pay. I’m not sure what the relationship between pay and revenues is or ought to be, but it seems to me, that regardless as to value, the products produce ‘rents’ and the ownership of those factories, it seems to me, take almost all the ‘rents’ and give the workers as little as possible.
This whole arrangement seems to me to be shorted sighted. For one, things like what you describe here can happen.
Paying people too little is as bad as paying people too much.
Squeezing the margins to maximize the rents one pulls in, suggest to me, that not only are they squeezing people, which a moral person might have problems with, they are also squeezing the product, as some place or some point.
You, know, I’m to the point where I’d like to see a premium brand build things in a premium first world country or at least in a first world wary.
@Tim Kane
You mean the Taiwanese company that it getting a lot of flack in the states, but nobody is even willing to say that it is a Taiwanese company? It is constantly reported as a “Chinese” company and the spin in that it is all the PRC’s fault.
I’m not sure about the politics. My comment has to do with how one party between labor and management is monopolizing all the ‘rents’ to the point that both laborers and customers suffer.
If parts are too cheap or labor is to cheap, the product will be, ahem, brittle.