Fri. May. 16, 2008
Anyone who follows Direct2Dell knows that we've been rolling out new blogs in the last several weeks. I see a key part of my job as Chief Blogger is to connect people with information that they're looking for (more on that topic from me soon). Things have been moving so fast, I haven't done a very good job of connecting the dots so far.
To try to improve on that, I wanted to try something new with this post. A while back, the IdeaStorm team started a Weekly Recap that has been pretty well received by the IdeaStorm community. In the week in review, I'll call out posts from the Direct2Dell family and try to provide a bit of context into where they fit in the blogosphere.
- Direct2Dell Japan launch: Overall traffic was modest for the first week.. only a handful of links from the blogosphere to the main site. We'll keep working to reach more customers there over time.
- Alienware and the Dell XPS Brand: A WSJ story sparked some discussion on this topic. Anne Camden stepped in to refute the idea that we were phasing out XPS gaming machines early, and reitierated that XPS brand isn't going away. Later in the week, John Blain blogged about our featuring two Alienware laptops on Dell.com as an example of how we'll work together.
- HP/ EDS Deal: This one got lots of discussions going in the blogosphere. In her blog post, Lynn Tyson said that the service model that Dell continues to build is based on a fundamentally different strategy than the one the deal is based on. I thought both Jeff Kaplan and Ed Moltzen offered interesting perspective on the deal. Other folks like Om Malik reported that the deal was about building a cloud infrastructure for the future. Marc Farley provided a different viewpoint (from a car wash no less) that agreed more with Nick Carr's take: the HP EDS Acquisition was about cash from IT infrastructure outsourcing, not about the clouds.
- Dell's XS23 Cloud Server: Todd Brannon from the Data Center Solutions team shared more XS23 details on the Cloud Computing blog about a custom server setup that The Register hinted at recently.
- 8800M GTX Graphics Card Upgrade Option: John Blain answered why this upgrade option for exisitng XPS M1730 customers was taking so long. He'll continue to publish updates on Direct2Dell as we have new information to share.
Bottom line, I hope this becomes a useful snapshot for customers to get an idea of what's going on across all our sites and how it relates to the broader blogosphere. I created a category for all of these updates called D2D Week in Review.
Feel free to let me know how I can make it better.