With Dell in a strange public slump recently, company founder and chairman Michael Dell publicly reiterated his support for current Dell CEO Kevin Rollins this week at "Dell 2.0", a business plan meeting with analysts. Dell has faced a slew of public stumbles recently, from the larger-than-life laptop battery recall to slowing quarterly sales to being one-upped by re-energized competitor HP (which is now in a small piece of turmoil itself). In addition, shareholders learned that Dell has, for an entire year, been under an investigation from the SEC. Dell just disclosed last month that the company is under an SEC investigation about how it reports is revenue, although the investigation is informal.

It's probably just very bad luck that so many events unfolded in such a short time that made the market and world look to current CEO Kevin Rollins as the cause, which is probably wholly inaccurate. Michael Dell, which is quoted below, also thinks that Rollins is doing a great job:

"I believe that Kevin Rollins is an outstanding executive," Dell said. "I think characterizations of the company's challenges being only of Kevin's doing are inaccurate. Kevin and I run the business together. So if you want to blame someone, you can blame me, too."

That is a solid piece of verbal support if you ask me. But with Dell in the crosshairs about improving its customer service and getting back on financial track to meet the saucy demands of Wall Street *analysts*, the job is far from over for Dell, Rollins and Company. There are many things to look at and possibly change to correct the course of this rather large ship. Long-term: how can Dell survive on commodity computer sales and server sales alone? First, it's the best at wrenching out costs from every possible angle, but that may not be enough in the future.

Is this a line dance? Last week, Dell's recall of 4.1 billion Sony-manufactured laptop batteries must have sent every laptop manufacturer scurrying to their quality control department. I should have just gone ahead and bought the domain, "applebatteryrecall.com" right then, because here it is 10 days later and guess who's recalling Sony batteries now?

Yep, Apple. The cutest of all computer companies only has 1.8 million batteries as a part of its recall, from 12" iBook G4, 12" PowerBook G4 and 15" PowerBook G4 laptops sold between October 2003 and August 2006 in the U.S. Unfortunately for the headline writers, no Apple laptops actually caught fire, although two consumers did receive minor burns when their laptop overheated.

While no one likes a recall, it doesn't seem as if either Apple or Dell will feel it on the bottom line; and, in fact, Apple stock is up a tick on the news, 21 cents, to $67.52. Sony Corp (SNE), on the other hand, is down nearly 3% to $43.27.

[Photo courtesy Dat Nguyen]