We recently hit a historic mark on IdeaStorm – 10,000 ideas! I want to take a moment first and foremost to thank the entire community for all the input – ideas, votes, comments and conversations! We launched this site to provide a public avenue for people to give us their ideas and vote on what Dell should be doing. Obviously, you have a lot of input for us and we absolutely appreciate it! Let’s start by taking a little trip down memory lane…
IdeaStorm History:
- February 16, 2007 1st official community idea submitted is Home technology makeover show (By the way – this was just Partially Implemented with www.dellmeansbusiness.com ! J )
- May 2007 First BIG idea implementation with Dont eliminate XP just yet
- August 2007 Caroline came out of the closet from the mask of delladmin_1
- October 2007 IdeaStorm got its own blog
- November 2007 IdeaStorm upgraded with new look and colors
- January 2008 The IdeaStorm torch at Dell was passed from Caroline to dawn_l, kara_k and jackie_c
- April 2008 Storm Room was added to the Dell Community Forum to provide a place for IdeaStorm members to carry on conversations not directly related to ideas
- July 2008 vida_k takes on the role as IdeaStorm Manager at Dell
- September 11, 2008: 10,000th idea is Glass Across Entire Screen by rsecord
And a few fun facts and tidbits:
- Highest ranking idea (and not surprising, also the most commented on with 1,830 comments): Pre-Installed Linux | Ubuntu | Fedora | OpenSUSE | Multi-Boot from dhart
- Lowest ranking idea: Now You Choose – Concept 1 (posted by delladmin_1 for concept testing)
- Largest Category: Accessories (1,787 ideas)
- 200 ideas have been Implemented or Partially Implemented to date
- 26 of the 200 Implemented ideas are related to Linux
- 11% of all ideas are about Linux
- john_h – the voice of Linux at Dell – has contributed 68 comments
And I would be remiss if I didn’t highlight some of the dedicated user community! As many of you know, you can view the top contributors here. But did you also know these facts:
- jmxz has submitted the most ideas at 264
- robinjfisher submitted only 1 idea and still has the 3rd highest ranking
- phubert has provided the most commentary with 4,433 comments
- jervis961 has voted on the most ideas by voting on everything except 14 ideas
- sugarbear has been one of our most active (and positive!) contributors across all Dell community properties including IdeaStorm, Dell Community Forum, and many of the Blogs
So, what does this all mean and what’s next?
As I quoted above, we have implemented 200 ideas or 2%. Is this good or bad? My opinion is it’s good, but not great. We did not set goals on how many ideas we expected to receive from the community on this site, nor how many we thought would be feasible to implement. As a company, we believe in listening to our customers and IdeaStorm has enabled thousands of employees across Dell to do just that in their every day work. This helps all of us prioritize and validate the work we do. We have also done things we never expected to do just because of the feedback on IdeaStorm – offer Linux and keep XP around for as long as we have – just to name a few.
As requested by many ideas, we are planning to upgrade IdeaStorm with a new look and feel as well as some new features and functionality towards the end of October. You will be hearing more from me on that over the next couple of months…
And finally, as Michael Dell has said in the past, “A company this size is not going to be about a couple of people coming up with ideas. It’s going to be about millions of people and harnessing the power of those ideas.” So as long as people are here giving us ideas and voting on them, we will be here to listen, engage and respond.
Thank you!