It's a serious questions. I am curious what the board thinks. I think we lost every incentive to innovate and we also see what's going on the exec level, so why bother.
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yep, @nz is correct, Apple Neo will cause major problems in the midrange systems market
This is innovation: Cheapest Mac out does our midrange systems
https://www.apple.com/macbook-neo/
Personal opinion from an engineer here. We have laid off so many people and are so short-staffed that we are basically putting out fires and barely delivering on our commitments that were set by some.PM that didn't consult with us. We simply do not have the resources.
Because succeeding at the company is more about rubbing people the right way than actually performing. Call it 'yes men', corporate politics or whatever you want. Couple that with never ending layoffs and people will keep their head down, take no risks and just do what they need to do to survive the next round. There's literally no incentive to go above and beyond.
People downvoting the Top 10 comment are wild, do you not believe in facts? The poster is referring to the Top 10 ranking Dell earned for the Innovation 300 rankings. Dell is #10, not sure why no one wants to believe it or be happy about it
#1 reason is the YESMAN culture in dell. People with any ideas different than managers or their managers are punished for questioning Bain or whoever is fueling them.
The ONLY thing Dell EVER innovated was the ability to make PC's available to everyone; which was when MD literally was selling computers out of his dorm. He made it possible for the average joe to afford a PC and well, it took off.
Other than that? Dell has never "innovated" ANYTHING.
we're literally in the top 10 companies for innovation patents
They’re in innovating.
Instead of letting experience software designers build new products, they’ve elected a brave new strategy of letting cheap offshore labor debug AI hallucinations for pennies and hoping for the best.
DEI
I'll give you several reasons:
- Dell has the d-mbest, most incompetent leadership than at any other time in its history.
- Dell engineering and product development resources are among the lowest IQ, least-skilled engineers anywhere in the industry.
- Dell is a Laptop, PC, and Server component/parts assembly reseller. That's all it has ever been.
- Dell has failed at virtually every high-margin technology segment it has tried to wade into (see #1 above) - Cloud, Networking, Data Management, Systems Management, Virtual, Hyperconvergence, Security.
- Dell has never innovated from a technological perspective.
@dg - maybe in the early 80s when Dell was PCs Limited. By the late 80s/early 90s, PCs were everywhere. I remember as a kid buying a Packard Bell at Sears in 1990. Got a Compaq at another big box store a few years later. Dell didn't start internet orders until 1996 which was definitely early to market for that. Either way, Dell's entire claim to fame was JIT inventory. That was Michael's big "innovation". Since then, it's just been copying competitors or buying them up.
All great comments. IMHO MD is getting ready to sell. None of his immediate family are interested in the PC business, JC will burn it to the ground if given the chance. Profits will be difficult to manage in the next few years due to RAM prices. It just makes more sense (to me) that he offloads for his 60th birthday
We had a product managers who did Qa all theor life, haven't set foot in a sales cycle and have been leading the PM org for years now.. ofcousre rhe product is going down the drain
Atleast in ISG storage we have a person who did a number on us, f'ked us up really good , vested rested and then left. He did bleed the org dry like a.sugar cane juicer. Lol.
He has left behind a mafia of senior peope who are still rest and vest vultures who only know how to talk write great confluence pages and BS Thier way all the to the top execs.
Even though Dell is still majority owned by MD and several equity partners, it is not the same company.
It’s sort of like some brands from the 80s, like Body Glove, Ben and Jerry’s, Faded Glory. Once at the forefront in their fields. Now just names on cheap products behind a famous facade
@dd Phone order then Internet ordering of computers was a huge innovation. Before that it was trips to your local computer store where you paid heavy commissions or built your own computer from local hobby shop parts.
Dell didn’t invent the PC, they made some incremental improvements but the sales method was innovative. The 80s were time when IBM sold everything in parts. You could buy the PC, then a separate monitor, and then buy the power cord.
AS far as the real innovation in the years from 2017- 2020? That was the products still sold under the EMC name. Unlike working at Dell, the innovators didn’t have to go to seven levels to get approvals. EMC was a much flatter company. I remember being hired as a support engineer. It was only four steps on the org chart to reach the CEO. When I was RIFfed last year I had two levels below me and six above..
@am - Dell's innovation "claim to fame" was being the first PC manufacturer to use JIT inventory. Had nothing to do with selling over the internet.
That's what made Dell successful. Most inventory in the early days was owned by the component suppliers and Dell only paid when the inventory was sold to the end consumer. That was big innovation in the 90s/early 2000s.
There hasn't been much innovation since the move to a PE management style.
Simple. They got rid of any leadership that was a technologist. You have company that claims they are a technology company but doesn’t have any technical leadership.
It’s a joke.
The goal is not to innovate products, it's to capture capital from companies and create a financial engine for MSD's personal wealth.
Further, MSD was always the brains and innovation, but MSD is slow walking retirement and as long as the stock is going up that's his only concern. He also has almost as much wealth tied to Broadcom as Dell at this point.
Jeff Clarke is the operations guy and given 5 new ingredients, he couldn't innovate a new way to stack a sandwich. But he could find enough anger to force his housekeeper to do it for him and then berate them for not doing it well enough.
Because he's such a miserable person, he's filled his ranks with operational excellence who don't talk back. Which is fine, but it leads to the innovators being bottlenecked because if he doesn't agree with it, it's dead on arrival.
This has directly led to ISG being a top-down org the past 2yrs in that SVPs are involved way in the weeds and have an opinion on everything. It's draining for high achievers because autonomy is non existent. You can't push back or you're called difficult. Even knowing something will fail, you're forced to execute, and then are still blamed when it fails.
Job scope has also increased rapidly. Not only do PdMs manage double the number of servers as previously, we're also forced to fill every gap that appears. We own not just the product but supply, pricing, commercial, service, and more. The goal is squeezing as much work out of as little of a talent pool as possible and optimize for execution over thought.
Just one example: we're asked to give an RTS date , we say "that's not smart until we have enough info from our (insert parts supplier) here, which supply team said they'll have in a week" That's not good enough, mKe an assumption of the best case scenario and give a date." "OK here's a date it probably won't hit."
Date passes, RTS slips, redo all the work you put in for the first RTS.
Repeat. Five to six times. Get blamed the entire time for the shortfalls despite repeatedly calling them out.
It's constant, and it's he-l. The PowerEdge XE product team of 12 has seen 5 departures this past year. The most successful team in the company is churning and burning through the company's top performers.
PowerEdge Core+ has seen a similar number of departures.
And it's not even the end of bonus season when more will announce.
Clarke wants to be Sam's Club Hock Tan. All the efficiencies, none of the compensation.
Dell is a fast follower, never an innovative leader
@c7 wow, interesting summary, coupled with the last two years of brain drain, scrum focus, tool change focus. with all the creators gone, only the sustainers remain, and they're made extremely lean and process checkbox focused only. hpe and smci are looking good for the long run as it feels like they have the creators and the growth mentality and the excitement internally seem genuine.
Sad state of affairs
To the person who posted the long epistle below about ISG challenges:
After reading that, it is crystal clear to anyone inside or outside Dell that ISG engineering and product leadership have absolutely no clue what they're doing. Add to that, the bulk of your engineers appear to be very jr, low-skilled, inexperienced, and void of real enterprise software experience. It's almost comical.
What you described is 15-20 years old. And on top of that, you're not doing it right. No wonder Dell Engineering couldn't release a parakeet from a birdcage.
Proper pocess is supposed to speed you up, not slow you down. In your case, you move slower than ice. You're either not following Scrum@Scale properly or you need a new process. By guess is both.
In my view, the #1 reason is you have incompetent Engineering and Product leadership coupled with low-skilled, inexperienced engineers who remain that way because there is no incentive to learn.
@c7 spot on..
I’ll give you 5.
JC
AL
GP
EY
JSP
They’re stuck in 2006, have limited technical abilities and are more interested in the “story” and building slides than innovating. If they want stories they should go to the library.
In ISG, We have been on a 3 year cycle of Scrum at scale as the priority - not innovation. The priority, as communicated from above, is to adapt our process to a new model (one that is constantly changing) - innovation is second to this. A two week iteration is too short to create larger innovations.
A ridiculous amount of that cycle is in daily scrum, retrospectives, grooming, meetings, and replanning. Scrum teams are beat up if they attempt to design anything that doesn't fit into a capability approved by on high. As scrum master, I shield as much as possible, but there are daily whippings regarding defect count (aging defect block entire domains from checking on code... no one seems to understand that throwing bodies at an issue actually slows the process down)
...and now AI is tracking the amount of time we use the latest AI tool (and are warned the dire consequences if we don't spend time daily playing with windsurf).
Add in the lack of hardware, centralized lab maintenance (engineers are not allowed to fix their product, but must put in a ticket that goes to teams who do not understand the nuances of what they are touching). This leaves limited hardware out of order for up to 6 months.
Add to THAT, our teams are at one third the prior levels, with most people being the only one responsible to some aspect of the product. When an entire scrum team was out for the Chinese holiday, developers were taken off their coding to attempt to triage that team's defect - doesn't matter if they are unfamiliar with the code.. or may break it more by lumbering around.
This week, two people in my team have PRs (code check ins) blocked by changes in "checkers". In one instance, a defect was blocked because some checker decided the code had too much duplicate lines... Not wrong lines, but repetitive lines. I get it.. those can be harder to maintain.. but the ROI of changing code that works.. existing code not touched in this PR should really be separate technical debt story. Otherwise, there is a risk of not properly testing this added risk.
The annual "hackathon" is supposed to be a reward.. a dedicated 3 days to innovate whatever you'd like. This year, the message was clear. hackathon project must have an AI focus. So much for developing whatever feature you've been wanted to create.
And finally, every spring, summer, and fall... people are keeping their heads low waiting for the next round of layoffs.
You can’t neglect the hunger games management style that makes collaboration nearly impossible and duplication an absolute certainty.
@OP The #1 reason is inept leadership.
Dell’s only innovation was to sell PC, in all forms, via the web. Every time Dell has tried to innovate they have been slapped down and the customers and industry has ignored whatever it is they tried. Dell produces commodity grade PC’s, laptop’s and server’s.
@ad And why is it do you suppose engineering is that way?
I work with engineering almost daily so I can fill you in. It's because engineering isn't soecial within Dell, they are treated just like most of the rest of the company. Dell treats them like sh-t, underpays significantly, and finds ways to get rid of anyone willing to express an independent thought. Even if any of the engineers left are capable of innovation, they won't because dell management keeps them afraid of taking Even a miniscule risk. We legitimately have senior software engineer leaving to rack and stack hardware for oracle. They are paid more and treated better there
Did Dell ever truly innovate? Certainly not organically. All Dell has done is buy companies (some good, some tu-ds) and drive them into the ground without advancing their technologies whatsoever.
Today’s engineering don’t have what it takes they are stupid and lazy.
Greed.