That's the path Sun Microsystems took in the earlier part of this century. The problem was, it was much easier to head over to Dell and buy a box and slap Linux on it. Ten minutes of your time, and you didn't have to try to convince a salesperson you were worthy of buying something.
You're not honestly comparing Sun hardware with Dell, right? You really think that Dell+Linux was competition for Sun?
Sun was selling to a particular customer that demanded rock solid stability.
If Linux had never happened, Dell servers wouldn't have made a dent in Sun's marketshare. Don't count out Windows either. They both ate away at the BOTTOM of the market for a while.
But neither of those have anything to do with a sales model.
If your hardware lists for $1M+ per box, you don't sell that with a webpage. You sell it after many many visits with the customerto be sure that this is really what they need and that they will be able to use it.
Go look for a price for the CRS-1/8 on Cisco's webpage and tell me if you see it. Same for Juniper.
The appearance of a price on a webpage is a clear indication that you will never speak to anyone at that company who understands your business or requirements.....EVER.
All I'm saying is that, even in 2001, it was difficult for a person to by just one or two Sun boxes. Sun didn't care about your business. They had salespeople to ahem qualify you. A hacker needing to get one or two unix boxes up and running was much more likely to buy an Intel-based machine and put Linux on it than buy a low-end Sparc from Sun. As a result, they lost mindshare.
So they didn't care about your business, right? That just means you're not their target customer, right? They didn't seem to lose mindshare with the customers that they were serving now did they?
I'm not Boeing's target market. It doesn't surprise me that they aren't going out of their way to post prices of 777 engines for my perusal.
In the end, you got the product you wanted (cheap Dell) and a business got a customer they wanted (dude with small budget).
I have personal experience with a company that moved off of Linux because they couldn't get decent enough hardware to handle their load. We could trade examples all day long.
The OP made a comment about web pages with pricing. My point was that lots of companies target customers that are not THEM. In fact, they often choose a strategy that allows them to explicitly target those customers that they think are their most likely prospects. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they don't. Like a lot of things that drive company success, picking the right way to reach customers is an important decision.
Don't forget that Sun was purchased by Oracle for a princely sum. A lot of those Sun customers didn't seem to feel that their dollars were wasted.
If your hardware lists for $1M+ per box, you don't sell that with a webpage… The appearance of a price on a webpage is a clear indication that you will never speak to anyone at that company who understands your business or requirements…..EVER.
You do realize that Sun did have pricing for almost their entire line of servers and workstations on their website years ago, right? I distinctly remember playing with their configurator to put together a $1.6M+ many-processor system many years ago - if only my credit limit had been higher…
They might have had list pricing but I never saw that page.
Not just a page for pricing, they had an entire webapp for configuring and ordering systems. You could go in, select a server or workstation, configure it (CPUs, memory, disk, etc...), with the price updating as you went, and (IIRC) purchase it online. Not all at dissimilar to the Dell online purchasing process, actually.
This was around ten years ago, and they removed the capability not too long after that. That was clearly an attempt to diversify their sales process away from just the salesman, but for whatever reason it failed and they gave up.
List price or no, they obviously weren't content only having the process that you insist is just how it's done.
Hey, companies try new things all the time and then retreat when they realize that it's counter to the direction the rest of the organization wants to go. I'm willing to bet that some people felt that moving to an online sales model was a good idea. I just think that a lot more people felt otherwise.
AAPL tried to license their platform for a little while. That died too.
My point (to get back to the original discussion) is that selling $1M+/unit equipment is fundamentally different from selling boxes that cost $2K. The OP shouldn't be surprised that the price isn't listed b/c that probably indicates that the whole pricing exercise isn't a neat process and involves more $$$ that they would be willing to part with.
For a lot of other organizations, price is (very nearly) no object since they are often the only suitable customer for whole classes of product. Since they're the market, THEY set the price. If you're a Telco or CableCo, you are squarely within the market for high-end $1M+ routers. If you're a financial exchange, you're in the market for ultra-high performance OLTP systems.
Lockheed doesn't sell fighter jets to school systems. I doubt a vice principal would find it insulting that they couldn't order one via a webpage. That's what "qualification" is: determining whether a customer has a use for your product and the budget (more or less) to purchase it. Qualification isn't about making snap judgments about a customer; it's about making sure you're allocating finite sales/engineering resources across the most likely purchasers.
Of course I'm not surprised that million dollar machines aren't sold that way. Sun had $3000 Netras, too. And lots of inexpensive workstations. These are what I was talking about.
