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...)
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