NightWriter: In cricketing terms, it's a sticky wicket. One has to play it on the back foot.
The European tradition is to buy from shops or specialist boutiques, not from mail order (or its modern cousin, the internet). The new government promised an internet in every school and Bill Gates got personally involved as did BT. In fact the Prime Minister visited a school this week which has just been wired up. As the younger computer-literate generation emerges into the work-force perhaps the idea of specifying one's own computer and its constituent parts and ordering over the phone will come more naturally. I think the new "culture" will be inculcated by the interactive digital tv, I wrote about this morning, with its shopping channels. (By the way I was e-mailed by a writer from "Wired News" in San Fransico about my post this morning).
It seems to be that the only way that a Dell direct sales model will accelerate the process for the general public will be if it offers dramatically lower prices. As for the enterprise market, the UK is in a single time zone, and most of its 55 million population, and the mass of its enterprises are within an area not much bigger than Louisiana. It is easier and cheaper for a CPQ to have its representatives cover the territory in face-to-face meetings with all the potential enterprise clients, than it would be in the US, for example. The single best thing a US based company could do, is to convince the British (and even more so the continental Europeans) that it is knowledgeable of and sensitive to the specific socio-economic, market and cultural characteristics of the UK. Unfortunately, we still feel we are using left-overs from the US market, and software - from factual references to spelling - is annoyingly American requiring constant translation. The same could be said for the big search engines foisted on us by US companies. I guess that Compaq does a better job than other US companies, and is probably accepted as having substantial European insights.
INTC has a wonderfully innovative TV ad currently out in the UK, which has a distinctive football (soccer to you) content which could be French, Italian, Spanish or whatever, but is made British by the simple device of having some of the scenes show a software message in english using a British word "goalie". In any case, its definitely not American.
In brief, yes, the indirect model must be maintained.
Victor |
