Priorty Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia What You Get with a Handshake

I had a very interesting dinner last night with a distributor salesman and a couple manufacturers' representatives. For those of you who aren't familiar with the relationships, the simplest description is that a distributor sells and a rep facilitates. Distributors stock many competing components and, except for very high-volume purchases, they are the place where you physically spend the money when you order parts. Like cross-brand car dealerships, if you walk in the door to look at a BMW and choke at the price, they have little hesitation to lead you over to the Buicks they also sell. Their sales approach is oriented toward building dealership loyalty rather than strict brand loyalty.

Manufacturers' reps facilitate the sale of a specific brand. When you check a bingo card, fill out a literature request, or otherwise ask for specific product information, your name and vital statistics are sent to the manufacturer's rep for that product in your geographical area. Even though the datasheets may come to you directly, generally you can expect a call from the manufacturer's rep. His job is to help you find brand loyalty. If he comes to you because you asked about Teccor triacs, Teccor expects that he's not going to talk to you about the Motorola triacs even though he might also represent Motorola.

For an engineer, getting product information and samples are important. Years ago, unless your literature requests had a major company name on it, they would be ignored. You might get a call from a rep, but the first question had to do with your intended volume rather than your intended application. For many of us, it was tough to get the parts we needed.

This obvious discrimination was the result of thinking that only $100-million companies ever design something with a product volume of interest. Fortunately, the advent of personal computers changed that assumption. Traditionally, only large companies could afford to design products that might be manufactured in volume. The advent of low-cost personal-computer-based design and development tools ultimately made physical location and company name less relevant.

When I mentioned this at the table, everyone agreed that what I described was a historical fact but they also believed the situation was quite different today. What I found interesting was that the catalyst for change was basically the same for all of them. The typical story always seemed to involve some seedy-looking guy with a parts list. He has this little widget he's putting together but can't get a distributor to sell him a few pieces or a manufacturer's rep to take him seriously. Finally, the guy finds a bunch of parts from nontraditional sources and makes his product. Later on, when requests for pricing this widget in 20-million quantities are floating around the industry, everyone comes to find out that he was designing it for Milton-Bradley in his basement. Of course, the design is locked in, and most of them are locked out.

They went around the table laughing as they described similar experiences where a little guy turned out to be something unexpected. Today, they're very careful not to prejudge a customer's qualifications simply by appearances.

Today, information and product support is abundant. Call distributors like Hamilton Hallmark or Future Electronics, and they have ways to satisfy small orders. Additionally, outside salespeople have become more knowledgeable. The good ones aren't just order takers. They complement traditional reps without as much brand prejudice. So, now that it all seems to be working well, what happens in the future?

Much to my surprise, they were concerned. Both reps and salespeople applauded the instant availability of manufacturer datasheets via the Internet. It certainly reduced the workload of satisfying requests. However, the anonymity of most of these requests was a major concern. While a distributor probably still gets to sell parts, the rep justifies his existence by appearing to enhance brand loyalty among the contacts he makes. If the majority of sales appears to be straight from anonymous Internet download to production order, who needs reps?

The picture isn't all that clear for the distributors, either. Without them specifically admitting it, I think their nemesis is high-volume catalog outfits. Distributors feel they add personal service and support to sales. Catalog outfits just take orders and ship. Distributors hate to compete with catalog pricing.

For the most part, I agree with them. I believe very much in distributor loyalty if not always in brand loyalty. Whatever the prognosis, history has taught us to expect the unexpected. I can't wait for the next episode.

Someone suggested to me that there is a simple test to illustrate the obvious answer. Pick a dozen Web users at your office and look at their favorite-sites list. Invariably, Yahoo or Altavista, two of the 50+ search-engine sites, will appear on their list. If you ask why, most users simply say that it's because these sites are fast.

There's a natural tendency for developers to include fancy graphics, multiple windows, and lots of bells and whistles in their presentation pages. Yahoo and Altavista are fast because they avoid bandwidth-eating graphics and high-end features. We've all experienced the excruciating wait at Web sites that download page after page of useless, albeit flashy, graphics before they get to an index page. You could have breezed through a half dozen Yahoo pages in the same time.

Future implementation of browsers in embedded system applications is a given. Successful execution, however, is a careful balance between bandwidth and UI graphic necessity. I realize that the experience of the past suggests that one answer is to simply force us all to increase the bandwidth and computer horsepower once again. The other option is to put a little more thought behind this kind of software.

Yes, Bill, this is one of those occasions that I agree with you. Indeed, there isn't a clear line between browser and operating system anymore. Agreeing with you, however, doesn't mean that I'm willing to live with only one brand.

steve.ciarcia@circuitcellar.com

Published: April-1998