Dell Looks to Get Planted

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Today, The New York Times published a story about Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) CEO Michael Dell, and his speech yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to announce the company's new "Plant a Tree for Me" initiative.

Now, I am for the environment as much the next guy, but I cringed to think that Dell was using this huge forum to merely tout an eco-friendly, feel-good idea that every customer should donate $2-$6 to plant a tree as a way of compensating for the carbon dioxide which that computer was discharging into the environment.

But there was more to Michael Dell's speech than that. He also announced that his company was unveiling a new service called DataSafe that will allow customers to easily upload data from their old computer to the newly purchased one.

The push into data storage services is in some ways a return to its core business (unlike its ill-fated MP3 venture), and is in keeping with similar initiatives -- for example, Amazon.com's (Nasdaq: AMZN) Simple Storage System and Seagate's (NYSE: STX) recent acquisition of EVault.

Dell officials also indicated they are considering launching another service that would allow the company to remotely and automatically tune up the customer's personal computer, as well as offering tutorials to help them learn how to make their home networks function more effectively and drive more traffic to their websites.

All of this is good news for Dell investors who have suffered for the past six years, because it suggests the firm is returning to a focus on customer service.

This trend is so clear that the company has even reported that it has improved its staff training so much that those annoying call transfers -- which invariably seem to result in the call being dropped after the third or fourth transfer -- are down 83%.

Who knows, with all the time Dell's new initiatives are saving customers, they might even have enough free time to go plant a tree -- on their own.

Have a differing opinion of Dell's future prospects? Let us know -- outperform or underperform -- on the Motley Fool CAPS stock rating system.

Dell is an Inside Value and Stock Advisor selection. Amazon is a Stock Advisor recommendation.

Fool contributor Jack Uldrich is currently rated 10,632 out of 19,671 in CAPS. He does not own stock in any of the companies mentioned in this article. The Fool has a strict disclosure policy.