By John Oates, 29 November 1999 00:15
NEWS This week's Behind the Headlines brought together Natalie Calvert managing director of Calcom; Rene Carayol, managing director of IPC Electric; and Martin Butler, chairman of the Butler Group to discuss the top stories from the week's video news. First under the scrutiny of the expert panel was the forced closure of Dell's manufacturing plant in Limerick, Ireland after it was infected by the FunLove virus. Dell was concerned that not just internal systems but the actual machines it was making could become infected so it closed the factory and recalled 12,000 machines. When this was discussed on the programme, Martin Butler claimed the infection of Dell's internal systems was evidence of a deeper malaise at the company. He claimed it was growing at such a fast rate that it is unable to install internal IT systems quickly enough to support that growth. Butler said: "I wrote about the quality of Dell products that it is pushing out to market not being what it should and I got a flood of emails back from various people who had problems with Dell products. If they are sloppy with the products they're pushing out to market they are probably sloppy internally with security, viruses and threats of that nature." Natalie Calvert disagreed and said the story showed the importance of crisis management and public relations in place to deal with such problems. The panel also discussed the UK government's proposed Ecommerce Bill and the refusal of Sanyo and Panasonic to supply their products to an online retailer Intersaver - whether it is a question of customer service or just protecting the retail margin of their other retail partners.
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