Hallo Geoff,
Donnerstag, 2. April 2009, meintest Du:
>> Also it's not like big discounts don't exist in the corporate world.
>> Back when I worked for $multinational our group rates with Dell were
>> astonishingly cheap.
GG> There was one university I worked for that Dell sold a medium-sized (approx
GG> 100 nodes) cluster complete with myrinet networking for a loss just to get
GG> the bragging rights (for promotional purposes, of course).
Probably your Dell sales guy told you "we made a loss" - but what he meant is
"i made negative margin". This in fact doesn't mean that Dell as a company is
making a loss. Probably there aren't many people within Dell who can get to the
numbers if (or at what price level) Dell is making a loss.
That is very complex as it has to do with factories working under 100% load,
discounts on quantities of parts, shipping costs that you can combine...etc.
And often you know about a loss after you did a deal... not before ;-)
For small companies it is pretty simple: 0% margin means 0% profit - if you do
a lot of those deals you go bankrupt. ;-)
Jan
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