I couldn't agree more about the inane forced segmentation. Frankly, what amazes me most is that they (or at least Dell) has been doing it for years, long before they were building in security and network-related features that might actually be more appropriate for large organizations.

Thanks to these two floundering computer companies, I bought my first HP two years ago -- and haven't looked back...

Yes Bill Luby, but HP does the same forced segmentation!

I understand the segmentation, after all the "sales motion" for those three different kinds of customers is very different. But I *do* mind the fact that once you choose to go down one of those paths, it is impossible to see what's in the others at the same time.

ObDisclosure: I work for HP, but unfortunately can't edit the web site :-).

I too share your pain on this one Paul. But as you know, this is all about maintaining different pricing tiers for the same products by "market segment".

It's about optimizing the vendor's bottom-line rather than the customer's sanity and stress levels.

To add to the confusion, you can get to the same configurations whether you started as e.g. "Home" or "Small Business" > sometimes with different princing though.
This means to do your "due diligence" you have to re-do the same configuration via multiple paths, and considering the zillion options they want to sell, it's actually quite confusing.
Gone our the days when Dell's config screens were easy-to-navigate, user-friendly. I tried, gave up, and ended up picking up a system at Costco, partly out of frustration.

Btw, the last thing these beasts with Vista should be called are "personal" - they are for IT departments, not earthlings.  (but I suppose that's off topic here).

How much does this reflect the respective org charts?

So many home pages simply reflect the org charts of the company, or which VP/SVP has the most pull.

The Internet as a Platform Will Continuously Evolve

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, an NBA franchise, and Chairman of HDNet, the richest blogger in the world claims The Internet is Dean and Boring days ago in his blog. Why? Here is his reason: Every new technological, mechanical or intellectual breakthrough has its day, days, months and years. But they don’t rule forever. That’s the reality… Just like wheels, printing presses, cars, TV, radio, electricity, water…Its very difficult to develop applications on a platform that is ever changing…

Well, Mark Cuban draws a wrong conclusion though his observations are right. Why?

1. The slow adoption of high-speed broadband during past 5 years in the US is not a problem of the Internet, or the proof of the Internet innovation stalls, it is a matter of domestic policy issues

2. From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the Internet has demonstrated its continuous evolution as a great platform in endorsing lot of application-level innovations, such as Wiki, Blog, Social Networking, Podcast, just to name a few

3. The continuously evolving of the Internet is good instead of bad, actually the innovation of the Internet itself is not fast enough, and that is why we call for Internet 2.0 to serve upcoming Web 3.0 better

Frontier Blog - search but not REsearch
http://www.hwswworld.com/wp

I'm with Michael, this is an attempt at price differentiation. As you point out, it significantly raises the search costs to make sure you've found the best price on an equivalent system. It gives them a crap interface, but it probably raises their margins on a significant percentage of the systems they sell.

most of humanity aren't UBER geeks. They watch Big Brother, shop at Wal-Mart, and need some hand holding.

Now, now, be nice. It isn't about being uber-geeks or not, it's about giving people multiple paths to your products so that you don't lose potential customers.

Maybe the lost sales are insignificant, but that's a different argument.

A lost sale is never insignificant, is just a flag for major trouble.
My experience a couple of months ago trying to buy online with Dell and others was that my shopping for a new system ended in my visit to the actual brick and mortar stores to check the products before buying them. After a good 3 days of browsing, finally I settled on an Apple (cpu) and Samsung (flat panel and laser printer) combo. I have not been shopping for a new computer for many years because my previous employer pretty much imposed the choices.
Also I had some good fun at the stores and the clerks were very friendly and non-pushy. And even with the 3 days the gratification of taking the stuff to my place was immediate.

Well, Paul, here's what the F*ck it has to do with anything:

Dell does it for a variety of reasons, all of which are available to anybody who'd be willing to do more research - an email or a phone call would reveal these "secrets."

- Each web segment is a separate company. For example, Small Business (Online) is an entirely separate company from Small Business. Small Business is an entirely separate company from Home and Home Office. They all have identifying numbers (Company 12, Company 4), and they all have different missions and product offerings. It used to be you could save on sales taxes in most states if you bought from Home & Home Office, because they only had offices in Texas and Delaware, while Small - Medium Business had offices in all 50.

- Terabytes of customer web buying behavior drive the web segmentation at Dell. And then, in each segment, more terabytes of customer behavior are aimed at the other internal design.
- Historically, Dell had Optiplex and Dimension lines. Optiplex for small-to-medium business customers and Dimension for home and home office customers. Pricing and customer behavior, however, didn't map to the actual product lines, so these products blurred across web segments.
- And it's safe to assume that while there might be some confusion in the HSB - SMB segment, the guy who's looking for 500 desktops and ten servers is PRETTY sure he's a "big business," and the education buyer is more than certain that she's going to get a rep on the phone or at the other end of the transaction that understands the procurement process in her state / district / township / parish. This seems really obvious to me, it might sound really obvious to the rest of you so I do apologize if it sounds condescending or it's not germane to Paul's question.

They make a lot of money every day from their website, so to say that the initial customer qualification process doesn't serve them well shows a misunderstanding of the sales process as it's existed for a long, long time. For grain, see that guy. For sheep, see that guy. For a roll in the hay, see that guy. For Ubuntu, see those guys, for a workstation, see those guys.

Full disclosure: I think Dell has a lot of problems. And yes, I used to work there. And yes, it was an amicable split. And yes, I'd work there again.

Big Business, Government, and SO/HO + Small Biz are 3 separate segments with truly different requirements. Static Optiplex designs are heaven for big IT departments.

I think the major difference between So/Ho and Small Biz is that they push leasing more heavily to Small Biz (cash flow friendly and tax deductible). From talking to support, you can get better pricing for the same system via Small Biz vs SoHo (i.e. XPS) depending on their configurator that day. The really annoying change has been how often they screw with their configurator and how hard it is to set up a system. That is nothign compared to the difficulty of trying to set up a system over the phone if you're without computer access for a few weeks.