The area where I disagree is that I believe that we need to have the
concept of an "official UKHA bulk buy", with agreed rules, and that,
long-term,
this will be good for the community. For those who've been on-line for a
long
time, you'll remember that similar things happened to the CIX sales
channels
about 10 years ago, and, whatever it felt like at the time, ended up good
for
the community as a whole.
... Yes, the end-game for this _IS_ pre-release ReplayTVs...
... which are, as you know, far better than TiVo or Showshifter :-)
:-) :-)
:-) :-)
M.
-----Original Message-----
From: BUTLER, Tony,
FM
[mailto:tony.butler@xxxxxxx]
Sent: Thu 30/05/2002 11:30
To: 'ukha_d@xxxxxxx'
Cc:
Subject: RE:
[ukha_d] A Public Apology
Damn
these crossing over posts!!
Apology accepted - it was a _little_ excessive I thought, but
forgotten
already!
I
don't see that adding a bit for time & effort is too much - even if,
yes,
an actual profit is made, on a product that people on the group want and
will
get for less than they would otherwise. It might encourage others to
do
bulk buys if they can at least cover the cost of doing so (or fool
themselves
into thinking that anyway).
Maybe because it's so soon after the memory buy you are thinking I
am
going to be doing this on a commercial basis, but really I'm still
relatively
new tot his group so I'm just trying to catch up on the gadget count - and
whilst I'm at it, if I can get a better deal if I do a bulk buy then why
not?
This
I feel is way different to the guy who just spammed about loads of PC's at
bargain prices or whatever it was.
Some
guidelines would be useful, but enforcing them would be very difficult and
constricting perhaps - eg, if I had to collect all the money (thus getting
exact numbers), work out the exact shipping costs, VAT etc on the memory
deal
then I probably wouldn't have bothered because it would have taken more
effort
than it was worth - so I bought first, told everyone the price, then
collected
the money (or even handed over the goods without the money because 'I left
the
chequebook at home - you know who you are!).
This
is in contrast to the other buys I am aware of where money was required up
front. Fair enough - different people are willing to take different
risks, so guidelines should not be binding on people.
Just
IMO of course.
Tony
Let me publically apologise for my very OTT message back to Tony. I
over-reacted to his "good god..." reply to my original message, which
wasn't
intended as a dig at him.
Let me further go on record with a couple of things:
1: I don't believe that Tony is excessively profiteering on the
AudioTron bulk buy.
2: It was ME who originally spoke to Mark about making profits on
the bulk buys... but read on.
This was _prior_ to Tony's recent post about European and "small
profit".
The reason I was picked up the phone to speak to Mark about guidelines
for Bulk Buys was because of the relationship that UKHA is building with
SonicBlue, who have expressed to me very clearly that they want to
understand how our bulk buy process actually works and is governed before
they enter into the next one (on ReplayTV.)
We discussed both past and current bulk buys, including (in
chronological
order) Graham', Gareth's, John's, mine, and Tony's.
In our discussions, I said that I was felt we needed a clear distinction
between those who wanted to run Bulk Buys as a service to the group as a
whole, and would try to do this at cost, and those who were
commercially-motivated, in particular the guy that Mark banned last week
for
just coming on and spamming the list with adverts.
The thrust of my conversation with Mark is that we needed to make clear,
in advance, the guidelines for doing this. As you know, I drafted the
original set of guidelines that, say, Gareth used. I think that it's far
better to understand what we're all letting ourselves in for up front.
We _are_ becoming a powerful force in the leading-edge Home
Automation market, and wholesalers are beginning to ask questions that we
need to be able to answer...
Mark
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