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Technology optimists are people who are unfailingly optimistic about technology. There are a number of characteristics of a technology optimist.

1. A technology optimist believes that any problem that we face today can be solved through the application of technology. Corns? War? Spam? Technology to the rescue!

2. They also hurdle problems in a single bound. Any problems with existing technology are either transient or the technology can be replaced with another drop in solution (and all solutions are drop in for the optimist).

3. A technology optimist believes that if current technology doesn’t solve the problems, then future technology will. So maybe we can’t solve corns right now but I believe the cell processor will be able to in the future!

By nature I am a pessimist, so optimists tend to get on my nerves. Aside from that, technology optimists are a real example of the saying “if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail”. They are people who apply technological solutions even if there are no appropriate technology based solutions.

An article recently made me wonder about the pricing and sales model for Dell.

There are two interesting and strange things from a customer perspective about the way Dell sells computers.

The first is the segmentation into home, small business and med/large business. The current theory seems to be that this is a means for Dell to charge their business customers more. It creates weird situations though. For example as a home user I cannot buy a server (I currently have 3 permanent ones and one temporary running at home right now). Or as a home user I cannot buy a precision laptop. No matter that I may do graphic editing at home and want the best possible workstation graphics chip. From a customer perspective the question has to be, why can’t you just tell me what hardware you have and let me decide?

The second (and to my mind stranger) thing that dell does, is that they sell overlapping products. Looking at just the notebook range for small business you can get an inspiron, a latitude or a precision. There seems to be little in common between the different types of inspiron laptops, 3 of them look similar but are different sizes, the XPCs are in a class of their own and there is the odd one out, the 1300. Likewise with the latitude, the laptop models don’t seem to have much in common. It is in no way clear which laptop may suit you, particularly as you can customise them further, upgrading CPUs and RAM.

Compare this to two other laptop manufacturers: Apple and Lenovo thinkpads (formerly IBM). Apple sells two laptop ranges: Macbook and macbook pro. All the macbooks look similar (you can get white or black) and are all 13″ and top out at a 2Ghz CPU. The macbook pros all look similar and come in two different form factors 15.4″ and 17″. For lenovo, there are the X series (ultralite and small), the X series tablet, R series (lower end machines), Z series (high end desktop replacement), T series (high performance portable). Each model also has a number (eg T42), which distinguishes it from previous revisions. All models look exactly the same.

In both cases it is clear what you are buying because the product lines are distinctive. If I go to buy a laptop from dell, I have no idea which range to buy from. I have to start doing comparisons between the different ranges.