Actually Bob, my neighbor helped streamline many of the Yamaha servers for
gearing up for just this type of service. But they are years away. The
answer as to why it wasn't done this way in the first place is very obvious
if you have ever had the "pleasure" of working at that level in a
multi-national conglomerate. Politics between MIS folks get to be very
funny to watch...I prefer UNIX....No I prefer LINUX....ME...DOS...naw you're
all crazy....MS NT40 or 50 or XP....and so on. The result is exactly what
we end up with.
In answer to your second point Yamaha controls the inventory stream by
significantly limiting the ability to cross-transfer inventories between
dealers. The spoke & hub set up they have (for the most part) require the
individual corporate offices to manage their own inventories. To transfer
the parts internationally...they have to go back to Japan then out to the
new units. (I know this because I asked for towels & cups & etc from my
neighbor when he was setting up the systems in LA. He could see the parts
globally, but was told they cannot be what you and I would call "interoffice
transferred".
To bad for us, but I can understand the nightmare this might cause.
Your soap box, now folks
SP
