Tech Watch | InfoWorld Staff » Dell recall -- free battery refresh, or pain in the butt?

August 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Dell recall -- free battery refresh, or pain in the butt?

TAGS: Hardware

With Dell recalling over 4 million Lithium Ion laptop batteries from both consumer and enterprise customers, the question of the day: is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Let's start with the "glass is half empty" argument. As with most product recalls, there's a considerable amount of customer pain here, Anyone who has ever had to hang around at a car dealership while a defective part got replaced can attest to this. The customer pain will be especially acute in enterprises that have standardized on Dell hardware.

You see, Dell -- being Dell-- outsourced battery production to a number of vendors, including Sony. However, the company claims that only Sony batteries from a specific manufacturing batch have the defect that makes them prone to explosions and fire. Dell spokeswoman Ann Camden told TechWatch that the company is erring on the side of caution in the recall, flagging "an entire generation of batteries," even though it's not sure that all are prone to fires (the company claims to know of only six flameouts, in total).

What does that mean? Barring a very detailed and up-to-date asset database, it means IT admins going cube to cube, popping batteries out of Inspirons, Latitudes and other affected gear and reading teeny tiny little serial numbers to see if they've got a winner...and that could take a while.

My friend Clarke Morledge in the IT dept. at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, told me that it could be months before staff there have a clear idea how many Dell systems are impacted by the recall.

Now the "glass is half full" argument, which basically boils down to this (no pun intended): "Hey, it's a free battery upgrade/replacement. Go for it," to quote Corey Null, at Principal Financial Group (an HP shop, and damned proud of it).

Sure, your execs and salespeople might be tethered to a power outlet for a few days while they wait for a replacement, but the pay-off is a brand new, fully chargeable Li-ion battery. Send Dell that sorry excuse for a power supply and get to enjoy, oh so fleetingly, every minute of the battery life that Dell advertises on its Web site.

Still, that opinion is in the minority. With worker (and public) safety at risk, and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission investigating, companies really don't have a choice about complying with this recall. Sure, its only a handful of batteries out of 6 million, but who wants to be on the hook if an employee is badly injured in a flame out, or an airplane has to make an emergency landing?

Other enterprise sources had varying reports on the impact of the recall that tracked pretty closely to how much they relied on Dell hardware, with more than one declaring the whole affair a "pain in the butt."

Anecdotal evidence from enterprise IT sources also indicated that Dell's going to have a big hill to climb to regain the trust of its customers, especially in the enteprise space. One IT admin told me that his company switched to IBM/Lenovo long before exploding battery videos made the rounds on YouTube. The cause: a batch of defective laptop motherboards.

TechWatch wants to hear your opinion on Dell's battery recall. Is this a bump in the road or a major IT headache at your company?

Posted by Paul Roberts on August 15, 2006 09:55 AM

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