Every hardware vendor builds or outsources utilities to expose and manage its hardware features. That's table stakes.
Dell, however, goes much further, spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on in-house development and acquisitions of pure-play software vendors. The results are consistently disappointing: products that fall further and further behind the competitors, ship with persistent bugs, and are widely viewed as unfit for enterprise use.
The usual defense is that software works as a loss leader to help sell hardware. But thin hardware margins can't possibly offset the millions of dollars lost to failed product development and weak customer adoption.
So what's the real explanation? Arrogance? Ignorance? Poor engineering leadership? Poor executive leadership? Something else entirely?
How does a company justify losing millions each year to earn pennies? I'd genuinely like to hear from anyone who understands the reasoning.