Dell Fumbles Graphics Card Buying Advice, Briefly Tricks Buyers [Dell Posted & Then Pulled Comparison Demo Image That Suggested Standard Graphics Card Usage Leads to a Blurred Display PC Experience]

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It’s not everyday that we see Dell, or any other PC maker for that matter, try to con buyers into getting a more expensive computer setup buy showing them the wrong kind of advice.

Maybe con is too harsh a word for what Dell did, but the fact remains that its actions, no matter how fast they were subsequently fixed, could have fooled plenty of less-savvy PC users into buying more expensive equipment. But what did the company do?

It’s quite simple actually, it posted the image above on its website in order for consumers to notice the difference between a “standard graphics card” and a “high-end graphics card.” In the process, to suggest the better graphics card offers users a better experience, it blurred the display of the computer using a standard graphics card. Not the best of moves, and clearly not to brightest either. When customers reacted Dell pulled the image and explained its actions:

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention, Dell endeavours [sic] to help customers to make the best decisions regarding their purchases. It was never our intention to mislead customers, and we apologise [sic] for any confusion caused. We have now removed the image from our Global sites. Dell remains committed to delivering the best possible experience to all our customers.”

Unfortunately this kind of explanation doesn’t really seem to be enough, does it? What caused the fumble? Was it greed, laziness, ignorance, or just a simple human error?

Well, if it was greed, then that’s certainly explainable, Dell may be trying to sell high-end graphics card this holiday season, and some marketing folks may have considered this to be an effective and simple although totally appalling strategy. In this day and age computer users don’t get fooled that easily. And they do fight back.

I’ll rule out the human error and bundle it with ignorance. This was clearly an intentional act, the screen on the left side did not get blurred by itself without some Photoshopping actions. But whoever did this should have known that a standard graphics card and a high-end graphics card deliver the same kind of performance when it comes to just starring at the default Windows desktop. Sure, when you compare such graphics card you’d better do it using video clips instead of still images, since stills may not really capture the differences. And if you want to do a proper side-by-side comparison then just go for a graphics-rich program that can really show the difference between graphics cards.

If it was laziness, then someone decided to cut corners and poorly execute a marketing strategy that could have been implemented in a better manner to convince shoppers to get high-end graphic cards instead of the standard ones.

Whatever it was, it’s pretty clear that it’s a small PR disaster for Dell. Were you fooled into buying more expensive PCs by this Dell blunder?

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