On Thu, Aug 5, 2010 at 12:26 PM, Ken Schaefer <[email protected]> wrote: > That's just for producing the media. Plus shipping? Staff costs to man a > phone line.
Yes, plus shipping and order taking. The business world has fulfillment down to a science at this point. > Multiple people to produce and vet copy that will go on websites. This stuff is not advertised or well documented. There are a FAQ entries, that's about it. It's not like this is a huge marketing campaign. And that's all NRE. > More staff to brief and train everyone throughout the chain. > Just so that, across the world, MS can fulfil these ad-hoc purchases. If they brief and train staff and have all those formal procedures, it's not ad-hoc. It's just another order. And if they don't have all those things, they don't have the associated expenses, either. I don't have figures on how much replacement media Microsoft ships. But they have their own telephone number and their own shipping address, and have nice packing list forms and packaging. The media is stamped and printed like any other mass-produced media. There aren't separate SKUs for "downgrade media" (or there weren't the last time I tried, which admittedly was years ago). I have no reason to believe it's not a modern, high-volume fulfillment system. And again, if it's *not* a modern fulfillment system, they're doing something wrong. If they're losing money on media kits, somebody deserves to be fired. Note well: I'm not saying it's a crime for Microsoft to make a profit off media kits. *The goal of every business is to *MAKE MONEY*.* I'm surprised anyone would expect otherwise. -- Ben ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
