Let Mikey Do It: Here's How Dell Can Reinvent His CompanyLet Mikey Do It: Here's How Dell Can Reinvent His Company

Technology -- Dell's purchase of Alienware last March has so far failed to produce the personality transplant the company's marketing people were hoping for. But simply selling cheap PCs isn't a winning marketing strategy anymore. Dell needs to differentiate its PCs based on technology. Once upon a time Dell sold PCs that delivered advanced technology at the lowest possible prices. It needs to rediscover its interest in advanced technology -- and that doesn't mean selling flat-screen TVs and iPod knock-offs. Corporate America, which has been Dell's bread and butter for a decade, is going to have to buy lots of PCs in the next few years, but it won't be buying $300 desktops. That marketplace is history. Dell needs to give businesses new ways of architecting and managing their computing and networks. Why couldn't a company simply hand each new employee a laptop, a Wi-Fi router, and a terabyte NAS drive to attach to their home broadband connection -- VPN installed and configured, constant communication? Virtual company in a box. Who could make that work? Dell certainly knows boxes.

Service -- The decline in Dell's once-awesome reputation for customer service has been sad to witness, and it's probably played a bigger role in Dell's losses than anything else, because it removed the only real differentiator Dell had. Any number of companies will sell you a cheap PC. Only Dell promised to fix it when it broke. If you can't get it fixed, you might as well buy an HP or a Gateway or a white-box box that leaves you at the mercy of the Geek Squad. Obviously Dell customer service has to be fixed, and the world has to hear about it. Maybe Dell could put some money into marketing its service operation to a wider audience by offering fee-based support for products it didn't sell -- other companies' PCs and peripherals. The service business is changing dramatically, and economies of scale could work to Dell's advantage in re-establishing a service operation that will sell its hardware. Access -- The effort Dell hasn't put into the design excellence of its products over the past few years has been devoted to its unquestioned expertise in building and shipping custom-configured hardware. It has wrung nickels out of the process of taking your order and quickly delivering what you want, and those nickels have built its billion-dollar bottom line. But that was the last century, when technology moved so fast PCs were disposable -- antiquated throwaways in just a couple of years. For the new age, Dell needs to provide customers with a different kind of access to technology that can upgrade their hardware without disrupting their routines. More modular machines coupled to vastly improved Web-based services might do it. This changes the business Dell is in. It's not cheap PCs anymore, it's corporate-class systems and network integration for individual customers. That wouldn't have worked back in the 1990s, when it was one-PC-per-household. But today, when home networks support at least one PC per household member and everybody wants media centers not only in the family room but the master bedroom, too, that's a business big enough for even a big company like Dell to deal with. And it will take a Dell-sized business, with all its warehouses, to capitalize on the market's expectations of instant gratification.