That link is Doc Searls’s note (although the link text above is my wording, not his) about how Dell shut down its Customer Support Forum because people were using it to bitch about Dell’s apparently horrible customer service of late. The point of his post is that while they have shut down their forum, the move is sort of a fingers-in-the-ears-yelling-blah-blah-blah move because people have many other forums in which to complain about Dell. Instead of dealing with the issues or at least trying to contain the blast radius of people’s complaints, they’ve drawn attention to it and spread the fire all over the internet.Eventually people will learn but until then, it’s very frustrating to deal with these clueless companies. I always build my own computers because I know the only idiot that’s going to piss me off in that case is me.

My only dealing with Dell support was when a server went up in smoke here at work (literally) and they told us our Gold service contract only got us a 2-week turnaround on a new server. After speaking to multiple people about it, being told nothing could be done, and us getting us good and pissed off, a new server arrived in 3 days.