Laptop Flipflop

Last night, I went to the Dell site to buy a laptop.... and didn't.

I admit to being a bit of a cheapskate when it comes to buying a computer. I want something that’s fast and capable of handling what I want to do (and perhaps that which I don’t do now but might reasonably expect to do in the future), but I’m not willing to pay for the Absolute Best and Fastest because I know that, like a new car dropping in value as you drive it off the lot, the AB&F won’t be the AB&F two days later. Plus, paying for enhancements that I can’t feel or see the effect of seems silly to me. Can anyone really tell the difference between a 1.6 Ghz processor and a 1.7? Does another 128K of RAM really buy anything? Technically, yes, but in the way it ‘feels’, no.

I’m also a bit of a Luddite. I don’t care for the way that the software on PCs is delivered. I think that the layout of the main menu, which appears to be ‘as we put it in’, is chaotic. It ought to have a ‘search for this app’ function, and be simple to rearrange (put all the writing tools here; put this game up top; move this stuff to the deep recesses of the menu). Additionally, I despise software that’s put on the PC in a full-configured state, but which ‘expires’, leaving you with a shell of minimal functionality, unless you pony up for the full package. (Are you listening, Dell/Sierra Imaging/Image Expert?) That isn’t exactly ‘bait and switch’, but it has that feeling.

But still, I went to the site, because I do want a laptop. I didn’t get one. The site defeated me.

Why? Primarily, it was because the site’s design and functionality were too slick, too coy, too hyper. I didn’t feel comfortable in navigating it, didn’t feel that I could ‘trust’ these folks to deliver a good deal. There were so many options that I quickly lost track of where I was -- it began to feel like a quick-talking street hawker. Some of the options didn’t make sense to me, while others went against the grain. Why, for example, did they so often offer one option level as ‘Dell Recommended’ , yet the default for the selection was something else? What was that ‘recommendation’ based on, a price/functionality tradeoff or profit for Dell? And what exactly does the Gimcrack Z9456 UltraCache buy me? Certainly can’t tell from the site. My feeling is simple: if I can’t understand it, the information is useless. And so I flamed out.

Speaking against the style of the Dell site is marketing heresy, because Dell has been remarkably successful in tweaking (and in some cases bludgeoning) the supply chain so as to decrease time to market and increase profitability. Their direct sales technique is a major component of that success, so suggesting that the site is counterproductive feels like going to Rome and suggesting that the Vatican would be nicer if it didn’t have all those religious icons littering the landscape. Dell is successful, in part, because it exerts a lot of effort to evaluate the layout, content, and flow of their site -- what sells, what doesn’t; what prompts a visitor to click-through to another page, and what doesn’t get invoked as often; which inducements work, which do not. They make it easy to buy.

But not this time.