On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 14:48:43 PDT, Matt Bazan said:
Not sure I buy that line of reasoning. Hasn't happened in the myriad of other consumer product lines that have open pricing.
The key word here is "consumer product".
Actually, not the case. CDW and Dell (and all the others) only publish their prices for the low end gear that they sell. Anything else requires a call to a rep and establishing a relationship.
"low end". Quite the overlap with "consumer". It's pretty easy to find the "best price" for a Linksys cablemodem. When the router price rivals that of a Bugatti Veyron, getting a solid answer is a lot tougher - the converse of "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" is "Whatever you can afford, is what you'll end up paying". There's not enough margin on a $400 PC to be worth a real salescritter's time. If it's a $20K server, it's worth a salescritter to spend quite some time haggling. And if it's a $10M sale, the negotiations and tap-dancing will go on for a *long* time.... (http://www.cnn.com/2005/AUTOS/funonwheels/09/16/bugatti_veyron/index.html if anybody actually cares...)