Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on
Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters.  After a while we started building our own clusters.  A well known large&#x2F;prestigious university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP, and bid.  We did.<p>We found out later that they simply wanted help with the RFP.  They never took our bid seriously.  Small company with a great rep, they preferred dealing with the large companies with meh reps.<p>Another one ... a university somewhere here in Michigan, an alma mater of mine in fact, did something akin to this, but used another vendor as its stalking horse.  We constructed our bid aggressively, and submitted.<p>Later that month, while on vacation with the family in Florida, the purchasing agent called me up.  She wanted me to teach the other companies how to do what we did (much higher density, far better performance, etc.)  I asked why.  She said they liked our solution.  They just didn&#x27;t want to buy from us.<p>We&#x27;d won the RFP.  But lost the business.<p>Of course, we declined teaching our competitors.  They (the university) were unhappy with that, and didn&#x27;t understand why we wouldn&#x27;t do this for them.<p>I was then, and still am somewhat, blown away by the complete lack of understanding of how businesses actually work, on the part of the RFP folks, the purchasing agents, etc.<p>Another time, I had a university call us up asking for a bid for something.  I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do).  She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase.  I asked if our bid would be taken seriously.  She said no.<p>Yeah.  I&#x27;ve shared some of these anecdotes with others in this industry, and we all nod our heads.  All of us have run into this before.  Some of the stories are far more outrageous than mine.<p>An interesting tangent:  I currently work for a company whose RFP we won ~14 years ago for storage, but was rejected by the person who was my first boss here, as we (the company back then) were too small.  That&#x27;s happened multiple times throughout my career.   Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all technical and financial aspects, we &quot;lost&quot;.<p>Can be disheartening.