9malls.com review of Dell, Dell.com Rating: ***  3 out of 5 stars Web site: www.Dell.com Who is Dell? According to Alexa.com Dell is your place to learn about and buy a notebook, desktop, server, printer, software, service, monitor or TV. Buy direct from Dell. The Alexa.com traffic rank on Dell is 172 and has 8,988 web sites linking in. According to the traffic ranking web site Quantcast.com Dell's rank is 51. It is my experience that Quantcast has a tendency to overestimate traffic rank of a given web site. Alexa.com seems to be the more accurate of the two. Monthly visitors total 13 million according to Quancast. Dell Review: Dell on ePinions.com has a surprisingly low rank of 2 1/2 out of 5 stars. Most people are either really positive about Dell giving Dell.com a 4,5 star and many are very negative giving 1 star. Lots customers state that ordering was easy, but if they had a problem with the order customer service was horrible. As I'm writing this review I'd like to see what happens when I call Dell's customer service line. Here is goes... I'm calling late at night so volume should be low. The automated female voice gives you a few options. Voice recognition software isn't recognizing my voice pattern. They are now sending me to a representative. Still more questions... Voice recognition software repeats questions several times; Dell's voice software really seems to suck at getting my voice right. Very annoying. Now I'm on hold. The customer service line is "now closed." OK... now I'm begining to understand why customers are getting upset on ePinions. I will call tomorrow. After all that why didn't they just say we are closed in the first place? The call tree took me about 4 minutes, every call option by female voice was repeated several times untill it understood what I was trying to say. Finances: The current stock price of Dell (DELL) is 27.31 as of 11-11-07. The official description of Dell according to Standard and Poor's is, "the leading direct marketer of one of the world's 10 leading manufacturers of PCs compatible with industry standards established by IBM." Standard and Poor's predicts a 4% revenue growth for Dell in 2008. In 2007 there was a projected growth rate of 2%. Dell is benefiting from consumers upgrading their PCs with the new Microsoft Vista operating system. In business year 2007 Dell had 57,420 ($ millions) in revenue. In business year 2006 Dell had revenue of 55,908 ($ millions). This calculates out to 2.70 percentage increase year over year. "Dell's share of the global PC market is at 17.1%, up dramatically from 10.5% earlier in the decade (Standard and Poor's)." You can see here that Dell is in healthy financial shape. One October 30th Dell announced it was "restating past financial reports and acknowledging more evidence of mistakes and misconduct (http://www.crn.com/it-channel/202800370)." Dell plans to restate more than $92 million. Even though Dell is in the midst of a crisis Laura Conigliaro of Goldman Sachs raised her Dell 12 month target price from 33 to 35. Dell has 82,800 employees according to Alexa.com. Standard and Poor's which is a number I trust more, has Dell employees pegged at 90,500. What I think of Dell: Good computers, but bad customer service if its ever needed. I would much rather deal with a local company than to buy online at Dell.com. I think Dell computers are good, but if their is a problem that causes you to deal with their customer service for an extended period of time just accept there are going to be some head aches. Also, since I'm kind of a tech type person I don't appreciate it when a computer company pre loads other crap software on the system other than the operating system. I like a nice clean system when I get it with the operating system and generic hardware. You won't get this with Dell. Disclaimer: Please do your own research especially for financial data. I'm writing this review to the best of my ability based on the information I've obtained and analyzed. Please look at this review as general information and not as a financial statement for Dell. Back to 9malls.com