nanog mailing list archives

Re: A case against vendor-locking optical modules


From: Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2014 13:43:17 -0800


On Nov 17, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Justin M. Streiner <streiner () cluebyfour org> wrote:

On Mon, 17 Nov 2014, Jérôme Nicolle wrote:

Is it unrealistic to hope for enough salesmen pressure on the corporate
ladder to make such moronic attitude be reversed in the short term ?

No salesperson is likely to do that for you.  They know only to well that eliminating vendor lock-in means they will 
lose sales on artificially costly optics from $vendor to a lower-cost rival.  Less sales = less commission for the 
affected sales person.

jms

Which is why there is NO Arista gear in my network… They lose sales of costly routers as well as optics to any customer 
who doesn’t want to promote this behavior.

It boils down to how much you want to tolerate/support/encourage this behavior.

If you feel strongly like I do that such behavior is aberrant and should be strongly discouraged, then vote with your 
$$$ and don’t buy from vendors that do that. Let your vendors that you don’t buy from know why they lost the sale.

I’ve found that showing a vendor a price-redacted copy of the PO to the other vendor can often lead to changes in the 
way they approach the next sales cycle.

Owen


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