Slashdot Mirror
HP Seeks to Block Competitor From Revealing Its Pricing
Matt Asay writes "On October 13, 2008, Hewlett-Packard sent a complaint to an open-source competitor, GroundWork, asking GroundWork to stop revealing HP's 'confidential' pricing. CNET has posted the letter, which indicates that HP doesn't want its pricing revealed, but which doesn't question the veracity of the pricing (which, not surprisingly, is 82 percent higher than the open-source vendor's). Does HP think its pricing is really a secret? It's publicly available at GSA Advantage. Guess what? HP software costs a lot of money, but presumably feels that it can justify the high prices. Why try to hide the pricing information?"
Maybe the price of the software varies significantly from customer to customer. I mean if you just found out that you paid 2x as much for software mentioned here you'd be pretty annoyed.
Plus there is always corporate paranoia..
I thought that is what their name stands forâ¦
How arrogant! What's next, software that feels it doesn't need programmers?
another fine example of the barbara streisand effect in the making.
see...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
stupid. sometimes I wonder how these executives think, or even if.
This is a long standing scam, where there person 'handling' the deal gets credit for saving oodles of money on the list price, and the salesman has negotiating room to figure out just where he's padding his commission. The list prices are therefore completely unrealistic, and they don't want them published because that might stop people talking to them in the first place.
I can tell you for certain that we (as in, large financial sector company) get 50-75% _discount_ terms with quite a lot of our vendors of IT hardware. I don't know what the rate is with HP hardware (we do use it) but I know it's a substantial reduction on 'list' price.
HP found out that one of their competitors (GroundWork) has HP's confidential documents. They shouldn't have those - somebody has obviously broken an NDA. Do GroundWork have any other NDA'd documents that would allow them to unfairly compete against HP? HP probably don't know. So HP are investigating, and one way they are doing that is by asking GroundWork where they got the document from. (Oh and they also ask for the document to be returned and for GroundWork to stop using it; that doesn't stop GroundWork from quoting HP prices because they can just get the prices from the GSA site).
GroundWork is doing a very good job of spinning this so people report "HP don't want everyone to know they're expensive". And that's a nonsense story - anyone seriously considering buying HP is going to ask HP for a price, they don't need to find out from GroundWork! (And GroundWork can quote the prices from the GSA site anyway). But it pushes GroundWork's key marketing message - "we're cheaper than HP" - and gets them namechecks and sympathy on blogs - so congratulations to GroundWork for excellent marketing.
I've been a software developer at HP for a little while since my previous employer was aquired. The amount of sales propaganda bullsh*t we get fed is rediculous.
HP has an online 'garage' thing where staff are supposed to submit ideas in the hope that their ideas are supported and developed. It's aimed at the technical staff to 'foster innovation', and yet the ideas are judged on how much money they can make HP and how fast. Nothing to do with making the world a better place, despite what their propaganda (like "the HP way") spews.
It should be noted that I view the average slashdot poster as a naive socialist hippie compared to myself, but maybe HP could do with some of that...
My impression of HP is that it's a massive hypocritical money-grubbing sales team.