On Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 02:48:43PM -0700, Matt Bazan wrote:

I can see your points here. But, I think there still is value to the medium and small companies that are not bound by these types of agreements.

If they wanted their pricing published, they would do so themselves. Most vendors go to extreme lengths to make certain that not even the list price of the high-end gear gets out, let alone examples of discounted price. Most companies do want an NDA signed, and even those who are lazy/slack about it for smaller customers would quickly crack down on anyone contributing to such a list. Why do they do this? Well, for starters they want to make certain you have to interact with a sales person. Yes we've all had to deal with companies who's sales people are difficult or impossible to get ahold of (some days this seems to be a common theme of this industry :P). Yes we've all ended up stuck with sales people ("order takers" really) who are incompetent, don't have any product knowledge, and who take days or weeks to return a simple quote. If you're an educated consumer who wants to compare multiple options, it can be a nightmare. But, understand that you are the exception, not the rule. Even in this very technical industry, most consumers are idiots, with no idea what they want or need. A sales person basically required in order for them to figure out their purchases, which of course presents the opportunity to upsale. Also, in regards to the extreme "list" vs "discount" pricing differences, you may be wondering why vendors do this. It all leads back to the idiot consumer. You'd be absolutely astounded at the number of government agencies, universities, banks, etc, to whom money is not an object (especially when people have a budget that they need to spend in order to not have their funding reduced next year :P), who will buy things at list price and not think anything of it. Even when someone gets a discount, the vendor can tell them ANYTHING about how good that discount really is... 10%? 20%? 25%? 30%? 38%? 42%? 50%? 80%? These are just numbers, that can easily be changed on a case by case basis. Remember the goal is to extract the most amount of money from each customer, which means having highly flexible prices depending on what each customer is able to spend. Obviously no one is wasting their time sueing you if your company leaks the price of a low-end router to one or two of your neighbors, it isn't worth the price of the lawyers, and it isn't easy to prove. In cases of larger companies with an employee who leaks the data, they simply apply political pressure to have the employee fired. But if you were to start publishing this data in any large scale, and especially if it even impacted one of the cash-cow sales mentioned above, they would come down on you like the hammer of the gods. :)

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.

Same concept really, they only list retail pricing for low-end products. Anything bigger, and you need to talk to a rep who is trained in maximum extraction. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)

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...)