I had dinner the other night with a pretty blond bank IT Vice-President. As the crystalline high desert skies above progressed from bright blue to velvet black, she shared with me some of her deepest longings — about her vendors.
For security reasons, the bank no longer allows vendors to remove, refurbish and resell disk drives. Good. Yet her vendors vary wildly in their policies and prices. Here her light blue eyes grew dark. IBM has a $25 processing fee to take a drive and drill it into uselessness. But the feckless gnomes of Blue Bell, PA., Unisys [they are still in business?] are less obliging. Evidently they want to charge her for the lost profit of reselling a used disk drive to another customer PLUS a processing fee. Her voice deepened slightly into an almost intimate whisper as she confided that she would NEVER accede to their greedy and thoughtless demands.
Unisys, I’m with the lady. She bought the drives, she wants them drilled, just do it. If your drive prices weren’t larcenous to begin with you wouldn’t have this business anyway. Give it up. Before one tough customer drills you.
VARs, expect this awareness among customers to grow. Maybe you can take take the initiative, and sell some new disk drives, by alerting your customers to this option.
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