5 Companies That Dropped The Ball This Week

Dell Sued Over Bad PC Components

It's a new, er, sandstorm for Dell, which in the last seven years has been plagued by serious problems, including misreading the desires of its customers, poor customer service, suspect product quality and improper accounting.

Dell apparently took ’Caveat Emptor’ to heart in the mid-2000s, selling nearly 12 million OptiPlex computers between 2003 and 2005 that were loaded with wonky capacitors that Dell knew had a 97 percent failure rate, according to recently unsealed court documents from a three-year-old lawsuit.

The Round Rock, Tex.-based computer maker had already taken a $300 million charge in 2005 for selling computers with motherboards that had a capacitor time bomb built into them, and STILL played dumb about the dodgy product it continued to sell to the likes of Wal-Mart and the Mayo Clinic -- going so far as to instruct customer service reps to "avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had issues" and even refusing to fix 1,000 computers Dell sold to the very law firm defending it in a lawsuit for selling faulty computers.

Sony Needs More Fan, Boys

Sony this week had to notify customers that about half a million Vaio notebooks sold this year have an internal temperature management glitch that can cause serious overheating in C-Series and F-Series Vaio notebooks -- to the point where the keyboards warp and users can get burned.

The vendor has a firmware update available for some 140 Vaio models and some media reports say a recall of 535,000 Sony notebooks is in the offing. Product recalls aren’t out of the ordinary for notebook manufacturers, but Sony’s already had its fair share of exploding batteries and overheating laptops over the years. Maybe the Tokyo-based conglomerate can add M&Ms to its many-tentacled array of goods and services -- at the very least it’d give Sony a product that doesn’t melt in your hands.

Apple's iPhone 4 Antenna Snafu

Apple's response to the widely reported antenna issues stemming from how iPhone 4 owners grip their devices probably isn't going to end up in any Customer Service 101 textbooks. After users complained about poor reception when holding their iPhone 4s in a certain way, Apple responded by telling customers not to grip their devices in the lower left corner, or buy a protective case.

Customers are calling for Apple to include a case for free with every iPhone 4 but the company has said it doesn’t plan to do so. Even Steve Jobs has weighed in on the issue, apparently dimissing it as "rumors".

The response was classic Apple: Blogger Boy Genius Report this week quoted a purported internal memo from AppleCare reps that instructs Apple personnel who receive complaints about reception to tell customers the reception is fine and that reception problems are a fact of life with mobile phones.

Reading between lines, Apple's message to customers could be: "You're holding a piece of technology heaven in your hands, deal with it. And if you don't stop complaining, no iPhone 4 for you!"

Leaked Microsoft Document Confirms What Apple Fans Always Suspected

Several purported Windows 8 slides leaked from Microsoft this week. Tinfoil hat-type speculated that the software giant did it intentionally to knock Google and Apple out the news cycle, but given that one of the slides focuses on the user friendly, "It just works" aspects of Apple product design. For those who believe that Microsoft never has an original thought and has built its empire by emulating the innovations of others, a more poignant confirmation would be hard to find.

Google Lets Its Facebook Jealously Take Over

Google Buzz didn’t have such a great debut, but Google is apparently resolute in its goal of taking some of the social networking conversation away from Facebook. Rumors this week about an under-development offering called, creatively enough, "Google Me" point to a possible Facebook clone. At this point it's still a rumor, but the impression one gets is that Google thinks it can do social networking better than Facebook, even though its attempts in social networking haven't had much success.

Seriously, is Google turning into Microsoft? That question has been asked with increasing frequency and this is another example of Google's business tentacles reaching into new realms.