Meet della | Lorna Campbell

Several people have already picked up on this on twitter. Meet della from Dell for all you girlies needing to “simplify your life with technology”.

della

“Tech tips” include:

Get healthier: Use your mini to track calories, carbs and protein with ease, watch online fitness videos, map your running routes and more.

Eat better: Find recipes online, store and organize them, and watch cooking videos.

Chill out: Stressed? Your mini can be your meditation buddy as you take mini-breaks throughout your day (schedule them, with reminders, on your calendar). You can find free guided meditations, download meditation podcasts, watch yoga videos, create soothing slideshows of images and music and even bliss out to Visible Earth images courtesy of NASA.

Travel smarter: …. entertain you in airports, trains and buses.

All is not in vain though, here’s the science:

Stay in the clouds: “Cloud computing” is a buzzword for what your mini does best: save money and time by using free online apps for everything you need-meaning you don’t need to buy, install or update a bunch of space- and memory-hogging applications on your computer itself. No matter what operating system you have, it’s easy to find free and low-cost streaming media and online apps. Any time you need to transfer data to or from your mini, you can stream it, port it via removable SD cards or USB flash drives or plug in an external drive.

Words fail me. Ada Lovelace must be spinning in her grave.

5 thoughts on “Meet della”

Thanks Lorna! See discussion on this at one of my favourite blogs, Sociological Images (it’s an educational resource site for sociology- among other things, it has all kinds of examples of the growing trend for gendered marketing- they are also trying to market traditionally “female” products to men these days, by making them sound all tough and manly- by “they” I don’t mean Dell, just advertisers generally):

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/05/12/dell-reaches-out-to-women-with-the-same-tired-sterotypes/

Oops, looks like they forgot to include the benchmarks for Crysis/Left 4 Dead/Warhammer…

It’s another world :/

I was just writing about cloud computing in the context of federated access – I’m sure the policy board would love me to include the analogy that it will help us girls ‘bliss out to Visible Earth images courtesy of NASA’. I assume the laptop comes with its own built in nail bar?

It’s depressing. But unfortunately it’s also likely to work in part of their target market. One hopes they will lose more sales than they gain.

Thanks to @jont on twitter for pointing out that Dell have subtely altered their fabulous della site. Their Tech Tips page is now prefaced with the following:

Editors Note: Some of you have read this article over the last several days & will notice a few modifications. You spoke, we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback.

The “tech tips” themselves have also been edited and although they’re not quite as jawdroppingly patronising as the original ones above they’re still pretty rubbish! As is this whole marketing concept.

Sarah Currier says:

May 13, 2009 at 10:26 am

Thanks Lorna! See discussion on this at one of my favourite blogs, Sociological Images (it’s an educational resource site for sociology- among other things, it has all kinds of examples of the growing trend for gendered marketing- they are also trying to market traditionally “female” products to men these days, by making them sound all tough and manly- by “they” I don’t mean Dell, just advertisers generally):

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/05/12/dell-reaches-out-to-women-with-the-same-tired-sterotypes/

rowin says:

May 13, 2009 at 10:36 am

Oops, looks like they forgot to include the benchmarks for Crysis/Left 4 Dead/Warhammer…

It’s another world :/

Nicole Harris says:

May 13, 2009 at 11:21 am

I was just writing about cloud computing in the context of federated access – I’m sure the policy board would love me to include the analogy that it will help us girls ‘bliss out to Visible Earth images courtesy of NASA’. I assume the laptop comes with its own built in nail bar?

Kevin Ashley says:

May 13, 2009 at 1:51 pm

It’s depressing. But unfortunately it’s also likely to work in part of their target market. One hopes they will lose more sales than they gain.

Lorna says:

May 14, 2009 at 10:21 am

Thanks to @jont on twitter for pointing out that Dell have subtely altered their fabulous della site. Their Tech Tips page is now prefaced with the following:

Editors Note: Some of you have read this article over the last several days & will notice a few modifications. You spoke, we listened. Thank you for your ongoing feedback.

The “tech tips” themselves have also been edited and although they’re not quite as jawdroppingly patronising as the original ones above they’re still pretty rubbish! As is this whole marketing concept.