A storage giant wants to give you 46,763... How many pages does it take to list Nutanix’s prices? One hundred? Maybe too few. One thousand – sounds about right. Ten thousand? Don’t be ridiculous. Forty-six thousand, seven-hundred and sixty-three? Well, actually … Yes, really – 46,763 pages are needed for Nutanix to list all its prices (or more precisely: 46,763 pages …
Seems like it could be much better handled by pricing each individual component, and allowing you to mix and match, with added modifiers based on how many.
Then again, what do I know. I'm only a human being who knows that documents should be under 1,000 pages. With this much you're surely getting to the point where the PDF format isn't designed for this much info, and begins to fail?
I have no doubt that if you ask Nutanix for pricing, the sales goon pulls up some internal website, selects the appropriate drop-downs, and out pops a price quote. But it would not surprise me if some government agency (or other large procurement organization) required published price lists in order to cut down on shenanigans with kickbacks.
It's probably easier to program the pricing system to produce this ridiculous document than it is to make the pricing system itself a publicly-available (and public-quality) service.
We got a RFP that asked for many many options, and combined prices for all of them.. and of course the licenses, etc depended o many factors.. so we had to use excel to model the pricing, and they got like 600 pages of economic offer. Of course they complained, but there was no other way to provide what they requested..
At the end we did not get the contract, it was very clearly pre arranged, as the winner did not give all the quotes required just the one they really wanted.. and how did they know when the RFP explicitly said that offers without all the options would be rejected?
Anon, as I can no longer prove it.
Oh wait, we don't need PDF. There are half a dozen universally supported document formats that do a better job with less resource consumption. The continued use of PDF is a conspiracy to by "The Man" to make us all waste disk space, memory pages, bandwidth, and CPU cycles. Just like cat videos.
I don't think it's that big a deal
1.) I believe in order to bid for US Government Contracts a list price guide must be published. I'm not from the US so maybe someone can confirm?
2.) It's probably every possible combination as a result of the above and other vendors have the same most likely
3.) Some poor intern probably spent a year pulling all this together. Not all heroes wear a cape.
4.) It doesn't really give you anything, discount off list can vary based on many things.
You see, the HIGHEST priced item is first on the list, and will likely do anything you want it to. The later descriptions are there to befuddle the purchaser into saying "forget it", just order me the first thing.
Of course the most expensive thing (first one) is the one with the highest margins, but who is counting.
Lots of people order things like that because they know not what they actually need, and say "Get it!". It probably leads to a bunch of WTFs along the way.
Do not hear much about Alvin Toffler's tome (which I read when a wee laddie) these days but he pointed out at the time that, taking all the options including colour schemes available, you could drive a different Ford Mustang every day for around nine years, i.e. never the precisely identical one twice.
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