Dell Blinks First

Dell in take down row, dell blinks, and in a surprising turn of events, apologies, admits they were wrong, and clears the record. This is about cool as it is something that they should have done, and ended up doing it anyways. Dell got a Good PR person, and we all appreciate that.

The story to date is that on the 14th of June, the consumerist issued a blog entry on 22 confessions of a former dell sales manager. In it, the sales manager basically spelled out some ways to scam dell, ways to deal with dell, and in some cases, the times you were just going to be screwed by dell no matter what you tried to do. In all very good information to know or have.

The bad part is that the consumerist was issued a “please take this down” letter by Tracy Holland, Dell’s Counsel. Since nothing was illegal about the article, and the consumerist stood by it, they posted Tracy’s e-mail and their response. In a brilliant set of predictions, the consumerist stated:

In addition, as I am sure you must realise - and there is certainly a history of this with Dell already - consumers tend to react far better when a company responds collaboratively to criticism, than when they act heavy-handedly or dismissively. Removing this story would be far far more damaging to Dell, I assure you, than responding to it on the Dell blog or elsewhere, since in telling our readers that Dell shut down our reporting, we would unleash a chaos of fury and acres of criticism in the press. Forget any legal position you may want to take, meritorious or not, I am deadly serious when I say that I simply cannot recommend this as a course of action. I’ve seen it happen before and it is really not pretty and I have no doubt that you will regret it. Source: the consumerist

Today, Direct 2 Dell figured it out, issues a mea culpa, and generally sets the record strait on the issues, and does exactly what the consumerist said they needed to do to retain any form of good public relations.

Dell did good here, and if we want to encourage companies to do this kind of thing, then the blogosphere, the consumerist, and just about everyone else who had words to say on the issue, should be saying “Thanks Dell!” for their response.

It is always good to see a company actually respond and not just go about their business with legal threats where they are not warranted. If Dell can goof, and apologize for it, then we should acknowledge that act and basically, back them up on it.

Dell has shown themselves to be responsive, and it is well worth rewarding them for the effort, and the way that they have handled the issue, once they removed the lawyer from the equation.