Bob to Carribean, bur Don to Dell

[upsilon]

According to the WSJ, Donald J. Carty, former head of American Airlines, will take over as the new chief financial officer of Dell Computers!

Edit: Sorry for the typo in the heading. My finger slipped and it posted before I finished and could run a spell-check.

Never thought of Carty as a CFO. Guess he gave up on being Chairman of Sir Richard's Virgin America.

FM, your thoughts?

 

[L1011Ret]

According to the WSJ, Donald J. Carty, former head of American Airlines, will take over as the new chief financial officer of Dell Computers!

We can wish Dell good luck.

 

[Nor'Easta]

According to the WSJ, Donald J. Carty, former head of American Airlines, will take over as the new chief financial officer of Dell Computers!

Edit: Sorry for the typo in the heading. My finger slipped and it posted before I finished and could run a spell-check.

Never thought of Carty as a CFO. Guess he gave up on being Chairman of Sir Richard's Virgin America.

FM, your thoughts?

My thoughts...

DON'T BUY DELL!!

 

[Wretched Wrench]

[/size]

I would not let Carty affect a buying decision yea or nay. There are enough other reasons. Such as their lousy customer service. Dell spends most of their money on advertising.

 

[PRINCESS KIDAGAKASH]

I would not let Carty affect a buying decision yea or nay. There are enough other reasons. Such as their lousy customer service. Dell spends most of their money on advertising.

You got that right. My brother bought a DELL desktop and in less than a month the harddrive quit. He calls up DELL's customer service in OOGA BOOGA,India to get it fixed. They tell him that he can only get it fixed by logging onto the DELL website. How are you supposed to log on to a website if your harddrive is broke? My brother went around and around with DELL to get their junk fixed. He finally had to drive to Austin,Tx to get a trade for something else. The laptop that DELL gave him in trade quit working(harddrive again) three months after he brought it home and the cycle repeats itself again.

 

[ronaldl79]

They're talking about this right now on CNBC -- interesting development. I think things went south for Dell when Michael Dell himself gave up his day-to-day duties a few years ago.

It's certainly not the company I remember of the last 10 years, but it's still the world's best PC maker and brand in the world.

 

[eolesen]

As much as I detest the man's lack of leadership, Carty's strength has always been finance, and he was AMR's CFO for at least five years before moving into the president's office. He's also no stranger to Dell -- he served on their board for many years as an external director.

So while Ronald is right about the brand awareness (definitely tied more to their marketing than their product), but in the server world, they've been surpassed by HP/Compaq and IBM for at least the past four or five years. Likewise with busines desktops and notebooks.


Sadly, since Michael Dell stepped back, they've focused more on the home business, and less in the business sector. Their quality dropped, and that drove many corporations to stop buying Dell for their data centers and corporate desktops. Home sales are great, but corporate sales are where the profit margins come from (not at all unlike the airlines in that aspect...).

After Carty was deposed in 2003, AMR's CIO probably thought it was best to make a gesture of allegiance to Arpey, and issued a decree to never buy Dell again. Since their quality had fallen, I didn't mind the switch to HP/Compaq, but most of my pre-2002 Dells are still running just fine from what I'm told, even though several of the newer servers have already been replaced. If their quality were still at 2002 levels, I would still be buying Dell today. Instead, I spend upward of $50K per year with HP, and they stand to earn at least $250K from me in 2007 and 2008.

And even PlaneBusiness.com abandoned Dell last year (after seven or eight years of running on Dell servers) in favor of Apple servers.


Totally agree on their poor customer service. Even as a large corporate customer, I gave up trying to get service on my last Dell after repeated calls to India, finally reached someone in AUS at their HDQ by blind dialing into their switchboard, and didn't hang up until I got a return authorization.

Since then, I've switched over to HP and have had no regrets.

 

[1AA]

It amazes me all that Carty did in his final years as CEO, AA employees reward him by purchasing a Dell Product.
They all b1tch about concessions and the wild spending frenzy, the near bankruptcy that Carty put this airline in before he resigned and yet they go out and buy a Dell computer. Wow, what a bargain. Keep shoving money in Cartys pockets, keep rewarding him for his failures as CEO at American Airlines. Those concessions we took are here for life. :angry2:

 

[JS]

I'm writing this from a six month old Dell laptop. I don't see anything wrong with it. Yeah, sometimes it does odd things without my authorization, but it's a computer, sometimes weird things hap

 

[AMFAMAN]

After Carty was deposed in 2003, AMR's CIO probably thought it was best to make a gesture of allegiance to Arpey, and issued a decree to never buy Dell again.

Now that's kind of funny because all three were in on the SERP BS and how quickly they run to distance themselves even though they are all guilty of the same thing. 😛

 

[MCI transplant]

They're talking about this right now on CNBC -- interesting development. I think things went south for Dell when Michael Dell himself gave up his day-to-day duties a few years ago.

It's certainly not the company I remember of the last 10 years, but it's still the world's best PC maker and brand in the world.

<_< -----Say what? What you been smoken Friend? 😉

 

[Wretched Wrench]

Customer service is such a bugbear with me that, as I ruled out Dell, I bought a Lenovo laptop on that basis. HP was close.

 

[s80dude]

I thought Don was going to be CEO at Virgin America?

 

[eolesen]

Now that's kind of funny because all three were in on the SERP BS and how quickly they run to distance themselves even though they are all guilty of the same thing. 😛

Sorry, but Carty is the one who intentionally withheld information from the unions and employees, and given his time as CFO, probably more at fault for the fact that the SERP went unfunded for as long as it did. Had AMR been gradually been putting money aside for the SERP at a rate comparable to its other retirement funds, there wouldn't have been anything to hide from the employees, and thus no April 2003 crisis to force him to step down. Irony at its best...

Still, funding the SERP was the right thing to do. People think it was protecting Carty, but it was really protecting people like Crandall and Bob Baker's widow. In a potential bankruptcy filing, they would have lost their earned penion benefits while everyone else's were being guaranteed.

Taking earned retirement income away from retirees, regardless of what workgroup they're in, is unethical in any book. If you are willing to take it away from the execs, then you may as well take it away from the pilots as well, since the bulk of their pensions come from similarly structured supplemental plans.

 

[eolesen]

I thought Don was going to be CEO at Virgin America?

That's assuming Virgin America gets a certificate.

Carty was brought it for negotiating power and to help push their application for a certificate thru the DOT, and it appears that didn't work out to well -- rumor now is that their application won't be turned down, but it will have so many conditions attached to it that VA may never get their certificate before running out of money.