

Dell IdeaStorm - SandB0x
http://www.ideastorm.com/

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kingsley_20
This is actually about 3 years old. I PM'd this product at salesforce.com, for
which Dell was the first external customer. We initially designed it for
salesforce.com's own community. The product is now known as Salesforce Ideas.
I'm no longer at salesforce.com, so this is not a shill :)

Many good things came out of this community. Dell started selling Linux pre-
installed on their laptops for instance, that was an early win. You can see
what they are doing at [http://en.community.dell.com/dell-
blogs/b/direct2dell/archiv...](http://en.community.dell.com/dell-
blogs/b/direct2dell/archive/tags/Ideas+In+Action/default.aspx)

~~~
kingsley_20
I designed this product to solve some of my own frustrations as a product
manager, so here're some of my thoughts:

Apart from the huge PR value (Dell, salesforce.com, Starbucks & whitehouse.gov
all got a LOT of press from these) that communities like these bring the
company, they are very good at some things that traditional roadmap planning
processes suck at: 1\. De-duplication: When communities coalesce around
similar popular ideas, it's easy to understand patterns of requirements.
Traditional request processes are black holes for this reason. 2\. More
Democratic Prioritization: Since there isn't a good way for smaller customers
to coalesce, PMs are often stuck implementing requests from their largest
customers. This solves that problem. 3\. Partner promotion: As a platform
provider, you want to be able to support complementary partners.
Unfortunately, partners often don't know what to build, or have poorly
targeted products. If you were building in the force.com ecosystem, you could
start your customer development right in the salesforce.com community. This
was important to me because I had a lot of friends in the partner/developer
community and wanted them to succeed.

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SandB0x
Is this a good example of transparency, or an admission that you don't
understand your market?

EDIT: Hey downvoters, this is a genuine question. I think the idea is good,
but most of the activity is from open source fans, which is great but they
represent a small subset of Dell's market. Many of Dell's potential customers
won't get involved - they'll just buy Apple.

~~~
richardun
I think taking this step shows that you're smart enough to know what you don't
know. For companies like Dell, etc. they know they need to open an avenue for
input on their work. It's good 'ole listening to your customer. It's like a
"How am I driving?" sticker, but it gets positive input in addition to the
negative. In all, it's input, and any company that recognizes that they need
to listen to their customers understands their business.

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aditya
Wow! I wonder how this will work out, given the Model-T/faster-horse analogy.

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ComputerGuru
I'm not sure I understand: IdeaStorm has been there for years and years.

EDIT: A quick perusal of their archives shows posts from mid 2007.

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aditya
Oh, didn't know that. I was referring to Dell using it as a way to figure out
what the market wanted from new products, and the analogy being, "If I'd asked
people what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse -- Ford"

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ramy_d
<http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/>

~~~
pella
<http://www.ideatorrent.org/> open source program ...

"IdeaTorrent is what can be defined as an "open innovation software": it lets
people submit their ideas, brainstorm them, and vote on them. The most popular
ideas and requests are then easily assessable."

Demo: <http://www.ideatorrent.org/ideatorrent>

Question: Do you Know - similar - Open source Idea management program ?

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benhedrington
In the same vein Best Buy created <http://bestbuyideax.com> and made the
engine free and open source at <http://bbyidx.com>.

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yummyfajitas
Wow, one of those ideas has a LOT more upvotes than the others. It's a really
good idea.

If dell implements that one idea, I'll consider this website a success.

Cell phone manufacturers, take note!

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tuacker
I wonder what happened to the agreement everyone here in Europe had in 2009.
Even Apple agreed with the USB-Charger.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10274953-94.html>

EDIT: Ah they (all) got time until 2012.

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bobx11
This is old... This is the same engine as starbucks ideas, salesforce ideas,
etc.

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bhiggins
When is Salesforce going to release this as a standalone product?

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StacyC
I have an idea for Dell: sell the company and give the money to the
shareholders.

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tsuraan
For the downraters: <http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html> . The parent
comment isn't a troll, it's just a (slightly obscure?) joke.

