“The last of the high-level executives Michael Dell hired in the early 1990s to lead his rapidly expanding company through its toughest growing pains will retire early next year,” Dan Zehr reports for the Austim American-Statesman.
Zehr reports, “John Medica, Dell Inc.’s senior vice president of product design, plans to leave the company by the end of April, spokesman Bob Pearson said. Medica led a range of operations during his 14 years at the company, but his biggest impact stemmed from the product-design experience he brought from a decade at Apple Computer Inc.”
MacDailyNews Take: He must have designed scales for Apple’s bathrooms. Close an ugly-ass, thick Dell laptop and you’ll have the urge to step on it to weigh yourself. Our apologies to bathroom scale designers everywhere for equating your work with Dell’s (total lack of) design acumen. John Medica, whose real title is “Senior Vice President, Product Group,” (bio) is as much a product designer as we are Windows evangelists. We’re sure Mr. Medica has many fine attributes, but product design isn’t one of them; at least not from what we’ve seen out of Dell.
Zehr continues, “Much like his entrance, Medica’s departure comes amid a rough stretch at Dell. Sales growth has slowed over the past two years and rivals have brought reinvigorated competition, so the company has looked to refresh its operations — and its executive ranks.”
Full article here.
Using the words ‘design’ and ‘Dell’ in the same sentence should be a felony.
Dell laptops look shockingly crappy.
yeah, someone brought in a dell to replace it’s power supply. those things are HUGE… no exaggeration. the thickness was unbelievable, and it looked heavy from just looking at it.
Just a thought, perhaps he did the best he could given Dell’s idea of R&D is going to CompUSA to see what HP is buildng.
Well I call this a stroke of good news! Perhaps designs will improve now for some of us that use Dell computers for business.
so he’s stuck in 1992 …….. give him a break.
MDN Magic Word “building” as in not building the right s— stuff
At my job, they just installed two new Dell Optiplex units to control security systems at our warehouse. These things seem to be Dell’s take on the Mac mini, but they’re much bigger, louder and have a power brick that’s closer to the size of the actual Mac Mini than the mini’s brick.
That said, Dell had some of the better-designed peecees for a while. I had an Optiplex tower 5-6 years ago that opened by swinging the side panel out. It wasn’t as well-executed as the Apple towers of the time, but it was miles ahead of the rest of the beige boxes.
That picture looks like my Dell Inspiron 9100. They are large because they are considered desktop replacements – not laptops. And the power bricks really are as big as a brick. It’s not too bad for a Windows machine if you reformat and remove the Dell garbage and other crap that they load in. Of course I never use the thing, and I’m typing this on my beloved iBook.
Does anyone know why Dell’s logo is a capital E on its side? Shouldn’t it be a D?
ds. =)
Los Angeles, CA
Um, he was at Apple during the Amelio-Schindler-Scully years. Remember the beige PPC boxen, the LC, the Performa? There was nothing stylish about them.
Granted, the early 90’s wasn’t a bright spot for Apple design. But, we don’t know what drove Medica out. Perhaps he couldn’t get traction of the manufacturing vision he implemented for Dell. Sure, make fun of Dell’s design, but take a look at Dell’s stock price during that stretch and amount of market share it claimed for itself. Design doesn’t have to be pretty, if the goal is to produce mass quantities quickly, inexpensively, and most of all – profitably.
Sure, Apple’s design is more sexy, but it did take a while for them to marry the beauty with the low cost and high margins.
“Using the words ‘design’ and ‘Dell’ in the same sentence should be a felony.”
and if that’s not possible, I’ll settle for “oxymoron”.
Does anyone know why Dell’s logo is a capital E on its side?
Come to think of it, it does look like the skewed ‘E’ that was in the Enron logo…
Makes me go ‘hhmmm…’
Senor vice president I believe.
Watching the recent XPS commercials on TV and Im siting here thinking “they think this crap actually is attractive?”
Yeah. Nice job Medica.
Wouldn’t know good product design if it bit you on the ass.
macromancer…
Sad, but just think…. SOME people actually think that Alienware boxes are cool.
Hey Uncle Fester…
While most of the beige boxes Apple sold in the early 90s look bad by comparison to today’s Mac, if you compare them to what the competition was churning out at the time, Macs were drop dead gorgeous! Mac IIci, Mac SE/30, Mac LC…
BTW, the Mac LC was a great machine. I consider it the grandaddy of the Mac mini. Simple, understated design, affordable (by the day’s standards):
http://www.answers.com/Macintosh LC
My co-workers were “ohhing” and “ahhing” over how cool his Dell laptop looked. One of them even owns a MacBook pro.
Maybe by “cool”, the meant “sad imitation”?
Hey, looks like someone else out there finally noticed the Dell/Enron logo thing that’s bothered me for a while!
Also, to be fair, I have a very pretty bathroom scale at home. What with it’s transparency and everything, it’s actually kinda reminiscent of a second-generation iMac
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iMacs are still way cooler though. Promise!
Actually, it looks like those shiny boxes one get from Macy’s and alikes when you buy a shirt. No worst no better: a shirt box.
Its freakin huge! now just put some big freakin lazerbeams on it and drop it in a shark tank!!
“Remember the beige PPC boxen, the LC, the Performa?”
unfortunately, YES. I used them at work and owned a Performa. I think the Performa 550 was one of the first pruchases my wife and I made after we got married. You had to be very dedicated back then to buy Apples.
Remember trying to get inside an 8100?
Remember pulling motherboards to put in a lousy stick of RAM?
The little recessed power buttons that sometimes made the act of button-pressing a challenge?
And how when the UMAX clones came along we were all excited because they sucked a bit less?
Ah, the good old days.
Let’s all take a moment and say a prayer for Jonathan Ive.
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-c
I was in the Northpark Dell store this weekend and had the opportunity to closely examine many of Dell’s laptops.
What garbage. They felt like cheap toys. Strange hollow spots. Weird balance. They felt even less sturdy than our last Dell laptop, which fell apart in a 2 week period.
Although the tops look awful, the bottoms are even worse. The screws, labels, and other garbage were crazy enough to distract from the ugliness of the tops.
The industrial design of the Dell product is dismal and makes our Thinkpads look like something straight from the future.
I *had* to go to the Apple store just to cleanse my mind of the dismal Dells.
Rregarding why Dell’s logo is a capital E rather than a D, either nobody knows or cares (to post), so I Googled, and nobody really does know or care… <hehehe> The best I could come up w/ is still pretty lame…
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20060914034031AAUHAW3
ds. =)
Los Angeles, CA