About f*****g time too!! We've been asking them for years to support the people who can really make a difference to sales. IMHO they will need to offer channel partner discounts to really move this along, but they've made the first step in the right direction.

Now to kill off the offshore call centers!!!

They have always known that some companies have sold on to others, and therefore have offered "better than web" pricing for quantity.

This I assume is how they will give resellers the advantage as pricing will be discounted by volume as before.

True enough, sort of.

We dealt with a number of these "buy 'em cheap and move 'em on to resellers" (or 'distributors' as at least two of them described themselves) but they got their butts kicked by Dell corporate on more than one occasion, drying up supplies and making them at best unreliable.

Channel partners need fixed parameters in which to work (margins, support etc.) and a guaranteed supply chain, anything less simply destroys confidence and moves resellers on to other manufacturers.

Let's hope Dell get this right.

I've never been a fan of Dell's scraping the bottom to get the cheapest kit out the door mentality. But I did like the idea of direct sales because there will always be a savings by eliminating the middleman (whether the end purchaser gets that savings, or the seller pockets it.)

However, either in emerging markets you musn't be able to avoid the middleman, or Dell did a horrible job acting as a middleman, and now we are back to normal businesses practices. It's a shame really, because the idea seemed like a good one. Almost Web 2.0-like but without all the hugging, and well before Web 2.0.

That must be a hard pill for Mike D. to swallow.

...Canadian Mall*Warts and Costco (both on-line and their actual 3-D warehouse stores).

We've been a Dell reseller for a couple of years now and have had good luck with our account reps, pricing, delivery, etc. I'm glad that Dell is finally 'coming out' with this program and giving partners some recognition-after all, we are moving close to $100,000/year of their kit.

Dell's slash and burn "efficient" business methods depended on constant growth. Now there's no new territory to slash and burn, and the far east subcontractors who do all the work are taking over the PC business, supported by a booming home market. Dell have spent more than all their profits since the beginning on stock buyback even as the stock price falls, and they are in danger of imploding. They are doing the easiest thing to avoid facing reality: stuffing new indirect channels where they have no competitive advantage with product. Outsourcing all R&D. Selling off their call centres and renting the service. It won't buy them more than a few quarters.

Far from being brilliant at logistics, Dell managed inventory by having higher volumes and better buy prices than anyone else, and having fire sales of high spec. product at prices no-one else could match whenever overstock threatened. But now they are taking about 90 days to pay suppliers, getting worse buy prices and no preferential supply, and they are of course having logistical problems. If they paid their suppliers in 28 days like some others, their $12B cash would turn into $3B.

Anyone who thinks inserting themselves between this dinosaur and its customers is a way to earn a living is dreaming of the 20th century. If that's you, I urge you to let go and move on. This could well be the final phase for Dell as a US corporation.

Dell is like any other pc company that targets mom and pop; they go for "good enough" and let it go. USUALLY, that is fine. Mom and pop USUALLY dont play WOW or any other high performance video games, nor do they have several dozen hardware devices attached to USB. BUT, everyones mom and pop are different, and the manufacturers need to be able to anticipate mom and pop's desire to 'augment' their new baby. Years ago, that was the trend setter- buy a computer NOW, then upgrade it as you go (add cdrom, sound, etc). NOW they are just stand-alone miniatures with some USB ports, and if USB isnt high quality, its useless. I remember a year or so back where E-Machines had faulty USB controllers on their boards. I also recall troubles with gateway power supplies, as well as a splendidly shitty compaq pc that was supposed to be 366mhz, but would get its ass smoked by a generic 266 of equal configuration. So, it isn't just Dell who is trying to get out cheaper and faster. Truth is, We all lose. I'd rather have better hardware and run windows 2000 than have crap-tacular hardware and run Vista. And did you ever notice how EVERYONE wanted to blame pc crashes on the OS? Maybe, it was NOT the os, but crappy hardware. Don't get me wrong though, I have owned some NICE computers from Dell, as well as Gateway and (currently) Compaq. I've also had quite the share of LEMONS from them. I hope the companies can see who is making the better components for their motherboards, as well as the motherboard manufacturing processes. Also, it is not a sin to stick with what works. If a certain chip from "IC Company-A" is good, and they come out with a newer flashier faster model that is less stable, I'd go back to the first one. I'd rather sacrifice a few small improvements to get better overall reliability. Remember the tortoise and the hare; slow and steady sets the pace-slow and steady wins the race. Don't let advertisers and marketers drive the market. The market is made by product, not advertising. Advertisers would sell you their mothers vagina if it would make a buck.