Re: Pah - what's the point ?
If someone has to buy your business, it's obvious that:
- They know their original price was just there to scam you and until you complained, nothing happened. They don't care whether you get a good deal, they just want your money.
- They can't compete against the others in a fair comparison.
- Your company doesn't care about what they actually use, preferring to lay their business at the hands of a fancy dinner for the CEO.
All of the above are only ever symptoms of the same kinds of "who-cares" management.
If you're signing up for multiple years on the above basis, it's game over, nobody is ever going to change that in the contract term and then the "renewal" can be to ANYTHING else and still win praise ("It will cost us more, but that's because we're not locked in any more", "I found a better deal for us", "I negotiated with our usual supplier and got a discount", etc. etc.).
I've learned to just ignore it. These people have elevated themselves to a position where their failure doesn't matter, even if it appears as a huge percentage of the costs on the balance sheets. They could literally spend company money on moving manure around in a box and nobody would care, because they "make enough money" even with that. Totally ignoring that they could make *more* money if they didn't.
Every sufficiently large organisation ends up going this way, and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it except start your own company and cut that stuff out yourself.
Personally, every single clawing salesman I ever see is just a warning sign - if you want my business that badly, there's something wrong. The more you crawl and discount, the more you're just trying to play the human rather than the numbers, and the lower those numbers could have always been ALL ALONG.
I've actually got into arguments with salesmen about such things and told them I wouldn't do business with them ever again. They can't understand it, and all they care about is their commission.
Personally, my workplace has several dozen mobile phones with a provider who just resell Vodafone contracts. We are paying way over the odds for pathetic amounts of data, text, minutes, etc. and nobody cares. We don't have any special requirements, we have a handful of "SIM-only" things for GSM equipment, and we're paying £30+ a month for 48-month contracts with only 100Mb of data in some instances. We also pay through-the-nose for a "device fund" which we can use to get them to send us a new phone. They obviously scrape the interest off those as we pay all the time but only rarely request a new phone. They never have the phones we want. New phones are ALWAYS locked to their network. They take ages to deliver. They send a SIM separately days later (presumably direct from Vodafone in a way we could do ourselves!). The SIM never fits the handset. We phone up and then they send us a multi-SIM. Then we have to wait for that to arrive. Then we have to phone them back up and give them the SIM, IMEI etc. and they lock them all together. And they NEVER have records and I have to faff and keep track of SIMs, numbers, IMEI's etc. for them.
And yet, in my personal life, I deploy exactly the same kinds of devices, either on a £5 a month minimum rolling payment I can stop at any time, or a £25 one-off payment and pennies per text (for the GSM ones, guaranteed not to cut to you off just because you don't use them much). Unlocked handsets. SIMs that I don't have to tally at all. I could literally slice the organisation's monthly mobile phone bills by at least 5/6ths if I was allowed to, plus spend only half what they do on devices, and there'd be no difference in service (only positive), and I'd even move the numbers over if it was necessary. For that you'd get TEN TIMES more data, probably free phone calls, etc. and none of the lock-in problems.
But they continue to use them for reasons I can't fathom.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
