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To: John Carpenter who wrote (14111)	3/8/1998 8:14:00 PM
From: PnclNk	Respond to of 95453

Big company inertia.

To: John Carpenter who wrote (14111)	3/8/1998 8:16:00 PM
From: marc chatman	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

<OT> John, the most significant obstacle IMO is the inevitability of alienating their distributors and retailers. In effect, they would be competing with their own customers. Maybe there are ways around this, such as buying out a direct seller (MUEI or GTW) and letting it operate more or less as a separate division, but that may be too transparent.

To: John Carpenter who wrote (14111)	3/8/1998 10:04:00 PM
From: Slide Rule	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 95453

John, the key barrier is that they have been successful doing it the other way for years, and have built their whole system of business practices (and rewards) around that. DELL talks about their "business model", which they adopted very early. It's pretty deeply imbedded. Whole company built around it. AAPL just switched over to something that sounds quite like the DELL sales model (at least from the customer's viewpoint). You'd have to be that hard up to undertake shaking up the whole culture. Some years ago, Harley Davidson made the change and it worked well for them. Had been nearly run off the road by Japan, Inc., tho JMHO -- Hope this helps.