Perk-a-lating products
A couple months ago, the product guys at my company decided to use Dell as our hardware platform and custom factory integration partner. (“Dude! You’re getting a Dell!”) It turns out that the Google enterprise search yellow-box is produced by the very same people. Also Dell seems to have shipped a couple of tens of millions of them through this process which tends to wrinkle out a lot of kinks.
The first thing that popped into the rest of the company’s collective noodles was questions and concerns about product definitions, platform configurations, worldwide support, parts replacement, and steps for factory hardware and software installation. The first thought that popped into software engineering’s collective minds was, “Can we get discounts on computers?
It turns out we can. A deep philosophical debate then ensued. XPS 720 versus 720HC (factory overclocked and hybrid, liquid radiator thermoelectric cooling and control circuitry). Vista 32 versus Vista x64. Core2, X2 or Quad? ATI versus Nvidia, Radeon versus Geforce, FireGL versus Quadro? Nobody discussed the prices.
After cleaning off all the drool off the monitors, everyone on the engineering staff came to the same conclusion on one thing: the new Dell Crystal 22″ HD flat panel monitors are the coolest. If you haven’t seen one of them, for about $1,200 undiscounted you can get on a list to hopefully backorder one sometime in your lifetime. Deep blacks, glossy technicolor hues, floating screen inside elegant metal and crystal smoked glass, webcam, speakers, and bragging rights.
In case there was any doubt why someone would pay $1,200 for a 1680×1050 22-inch display, I’ve included Dell’s own banner below.
For goodness sakes, the thing even took home the Best of CES Innovations Award for 2008. You’ll be hard pressed to find anyone at our company that would disagree with that.
Our CFO and VP of Finance did.
Apparently it’s a luxury far beyond the reach of mere VP’s. Not to be deterred, I quickly hatched a plan. I convinced our glorious CEO that this was a CEO monitor. All the CEOs were getting them this year. I told him it looks really bad when some big important customer comes into his little CEO office, sits across his little CEO desk from him, and can’t see through the edges of his monitor, has to listen to his Webcast from lame speakers cluttering up his “productive area”, can’t take pictures or video from his 2-megapixel Webcam of the customer promising to buy our software, or can’t view our online Website and brochures in stunning dark blacks, sharp images, crisp text, and brilliant color saturation with life-like detail.
He told me he’d think about it, so I bribed his administrative assistant with chocolate, made her fill out the purchase order, and found my asbestos coat for the flaming I’ll get for rogue purchasing.
Now all I need to do is pray that Dell comes out with a 27″ Crystal flat panel monitor sometime soon and hope I get the hand-me-down.
