Speculate to accumulate

Recently, I was flicking through a weekly magazine aimed at corporate users and came across a short letter that attracted my attention.

It was from a computer manager who was expressing a concern that Digital did not go the same way as Compaq in customer support. His worry was that Digital would start hiding behind its resellers and thus pass the buck for any problem that emerged. With attitudes like this out there, it's little wonder that vendors continue to look at, or exercise, direct selling models.

But we've all been there. Hardware vendor blames software vendor, software vendor blames the hardware, you play piggy-in-the-middle and the user thinks it's you that's providing a poor service.

Why can't we solve this dilemma? Shouldn't the dealer know what's going on and be capable of sorting out the problem? Well, yes, but there are a lot of different parameters, a lot of things you need to know about in-depth. And most important of all, you need experience. With products changing constantly and many different vendors and technologies to deal with, is it any wonder that technical staff can't keep up?

Then we have skills shortages and the problems everyone has making money and providing adequate resources to add to the equation. It's hard to keep all the people happy all of the time.

This is the problem: businesses in the channel are all driven by different needs. Resellers need to make a living and keep their customers happy.

Distributors need to make a profit and - in most cases - achieve certain volumes of sales. The leading vendors are governed by Wall Street.

Vendors, distributors and dealers have never become stakeholders in each other's businesses - how many shares in Northamber or Datrontech or Ideal Hardware do you own? How much money have you invested in Microsoft, in Compaq, in Sun?

It doesn't matter to shareholders if the customer is disgruntled, as long as they can keep sales moving. Vendors talk about partnerships with resellers and the channel being their lifeblood, but really it's just the most efficient route to market.

Maybe we need more users and channel people in shareholders' meetings.

Maybe we need more of the kind of approach we have seen from the group of Pegasus' dealers last month - investing their own money in the company to give investment a boost.

OK, it would take a lot of dealers and customers to have an influence on Microsoft, but if the business depends on these solutions, shouldn't we be able to influence the policies of those businesses? But then, how much real power do the user and dealer have?

We all talk about 'partnerships', but what do we really mean? Aren't dealers - and customers - just saying they want more out of the vendor than they get now? Maybe you do, but if you don't put anything back in, can you expect to get anything more, or even anything different, back?

Simon Meredith is a freelance IT journalist.