How Not To Sell Software in 2012
I've once worked in a company on the other side of this. I needed a particular piece of software for work that was ~$50 on Amazon, with a $10 rebate, and something like $60 when bought from their website directly. They had a trial, and buying it was as easy as giving them your credit card number.Now the company I worked for had a policy to only obtain computery things through a supplier, which would be a local vendor or shop selling this software. The trick is, nobody does that for some random software on the interwebs that's only $50. The purchasing process itself also cost something like $700 for any individual invoice.So two minions and a purchasing manager set off on a journey to find a supplier for this software, with my boss, my office manager, and me constantly nagging them, as it was urgent. After two weeks they came back and said it was sadly impossible to buy this software. We ended up shipping our software late due to the delay, and buying the tool from Amazon, expensing it as a book.Moral of the story: the old BigCos indeed force this behaviour out of suppliers.