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...

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.

Yeah, it was done around May, 2007. It was originally Crispy News. I worked with Norimasa Yoshida to get it set up for Dell, and in the process to Salesforce. I agree, I think it was definitely a win for the Linux community at least.

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.

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.

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

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.

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"

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 ?

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

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

Best. Comment. Ever.