A case against vendor-locking optical modules

Mon Dec 1 21:43:17 UTC 2014

> On Nov 17, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Justin M. Streiner <streiner at cluebyfour.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 17 Nov 2014, Jérôme Nicolle wrote:
> 
>> Is it unrealistic to hope for enough salesmen pressure on the corporate
>> ladder to make such moronic attitude be reversed in the short term ?
> 
> No salesperson is likely to do that for you.  They know only to well that eliminating vendor lock-in means they will lose sales on artificially costly optics from $vendor to a lower-cost rival.  Less sales = less commission for the affected sales person.
> 
> jms

Which is why there is NO Arista gear in my network… They lose sales of costly routers as well as optics to any customer who doesn’t want to promote this behavior.

It boils down to how much you want to tolerate/support/encourage this behavior.

If you feel strongly like I do that such behavior is aberrant and should be strongly discouraged, then vote with your $$$ and don’t buy from vendors that do that. Let your vendors that you don’t buy from know why they lost the sale.

I’ve found that showing a vendor a price-redacted copy of the PO to the other vendor can often lead to changes in the way they approach the next sales cycle.

Owen