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Technology Stocks : BORL: Time to BUY! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: shane forbes who wrote (8667)	1/22/1998 8:27:00 AM
From: Scott Pedigo	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10836

Since Del is following this thread (assuming we haven't all been the victims of some domain name hijinx...) and Borland is about to adopt a new marketing strategy, I'd like to say this as a long-time user of Borland products (since TP 2.0) and a current international customer: don't let distributors price-gouge the customers, if you want to keep Borland's reputation from sinking. Rant follows, which other readers can skip... I'm an expatriate U.S. citizen who used Borland products in the U.S. before I moved to Europe. I really liked being able to order by mail directly from the company back in the old days. For awhile I was even able to order directly from overseas. Then Borland gave exclusive distribution rights to their daughter company in Germany, and to other non-related companies in countries like Switzerland. The greedy b_______s thought they had everyone by the short hairs and basically tripled the prices of the Borland products. To protect these distributors, Borland refused to ship directly to overseas customers anymore, and eventually even forbade mail-order U.S. retailers to do so, or even to ship to U.S. addresses for customers whose credit cards had billing addresses outside of the country. (Seems like a violation of free trade to me.) You can imagine what kind of impression I had of the company after that. I didn't want a foreign language version of a product, just the U.S. version. But I wasn't willing to pay the horrendous 200% markup on a U.S. version, which was probably put on it just so there wouldn't be a glaring difference in price with the foreign language version. What U.S. companies don't realize is that Europe has a totally different business culture, NOT CONSUMER FRIENDLY. The French are famous for rude waiters, the Germans for shop- keepers who think they're doing you a favor by selling you something. Cartels are the rule, rather than the exception, and only international competition (when belatedly allowed, thank you GATT) keeps the rich business owners from gouging the customers to the max. Don't try to tell me that these distributors provide any service, either. It is non-existent, or abysmal. The only help I ever got was via forums on CompuServe. So when you are organizing marketing channels in the U.S. or especially outside of the U.S., make sure that no single company has a monopoly in a given area. Even the distributors should have to compete for customers. If they don't have to, they'll end up giving your products a bad name. End of rant