12 What Would Google Do?
and most important lesson in this book—is this: Companies must learn
that they are better off when they cede control to their customers. Give us
control, we will use it, and you will win.
Dell hell
Here is a case study in Jarvis’ First Law involving Dell and me. But it isn’t
about me, the angry customer. It is about how Dell transformed itself from
worst to first in the era of customer control. Dell had been the poster
child for what you should not do. en it became a model for what you
should do.
After I quit my job as a media executive and left my expense account
behind, I had to buy a new laptop. I bought a Dell, because it was inex
-
pensive and because Dell had a reputation for good customer service. To
be safe, I paid extra for at-home service.
From the moment I fi rst turned on the computer, it had problems. I’ll
spare you the excruciating details of my shaggy laptop story. Suffi ce it to
say that the computer had a number of bugs and I tried to fix them a
number of times, spending countless hours on hold with people in far
-
away lands. ough I had paid for in-home service, I had to send the ma-
chine in to get it fixed, only to find something new wrong every time I got
it back. Each time I dared to contact Dell, I had to start from square one:
Sisyphus on hold. I never made progress. It drove me mad.
Finally, in hopeless frustration, I went to my blog in June 2005 and
wrote a post under the headline, “Dell sucks.” Now that’s not quite as
juvenile as it sounds, for if you search Google for any brand followed
by the word “sucks,” you will find the Consumer Reports of the people.
I wanted to add to the wisdom of the crowd—which Google now made
possible. I wanted to warn off the next potential customer who was smart
enough to search for “Dell sucks” before hitting the buy button (which I
should have done in the first place; the knowledge was there, at Google—all
I had to do was ask). ere were already a few million results for “Dell
sucks.” Mine was just one more. I didn’t think I could fi x my problem this
way. I didn’t think anything would come of it. But I got to vent steam. And
that made me feel better. If I had known that my post would spark a pop u
-
lar movement and PR avalanche, I might have been more temperate in my
language. But, hey, I was angry. is is what I blogged:
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