Calling all NANOG'ers - idea for national hardware price quote registry
Matt Bazan
Mbazan at onelegal.com
Fri Sep 16 21:48:43 UTC 2005
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On
> Behalf Of Sean Figgins
>
> Most of the vendors I know of like to wine and dine the VPs.
> If a NDA gets violated, the vendor will not be forced to stop
> dealing with the company, just get the employee that violated
> the NDA to be fired.
> Companies are getting very, very picky about this kind of
> information getting out. And, if your company is publically
> traded, I am sure that some consultant will claim this is a
> violation of Sarbanes-Oxley.
>
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.
> > > 6) Such a list is likely actually cause companies to have
> to pay more.
> >
> > Not sure about the logic here...
>
> Logic goes like this: Company is seeing that it's prices are
> getting out.
> Company stopps giving the good discounts to anyone, as they
> will have to give them to everyone otherwise...
>
Not sure I buy that line of reasoning. Hasn't happened in the myriad of
other consumer product lines that have open pricing. In fact, just the
opposite happens. Open pricing drives pricing down - not up. This is
exactly the type of culture these hardware companies want. When you
have closed pricing - in any industry - the buyer is always at the
disadvantage. It's time to open this up.
> If you are already doing business with a company, and just
> want to have some incremental additional devices or services,
> then you probably don't have to talk to a sales guy much to
> get a quote from him.
>
> If you are shopping for the best price, and don't care about
> support costs, or technical specs, then go shop at CDW, or
> dell.com. Their prices are published.
>
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.
Matt
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