CompuServe Thread

David- I can really attest to Autodesk s original lack of commitment to the dealer channel. Back in the 70s we used to sell a product which was called the Datascribe froma company called Alphamerics. It was essentially a large flat bed plotter with a keyboard on it that allowed people to do lettering without resorting to the Leroy set (remember those?). In the early 80's they added an HP-IB and RS-232 interface to the machine, and HP-GL. They arranged an OEM agreement with NEC and a new company called Autodesk, and we used to get an NEC-APC (8086, 8 Inch Disks, and a whopping 128K, expandable to 512K) and AutoCAD. You used to go in with debug and edit the executable to change AUTOCad to QUIKCad<g>. That was 1.3; With V1.4 NEC had a deal with Autodesk that AutoCAD was _FREE_ if you bought an NEC APC computer. They also had OEM agreements with Encode and Bridgeport that I know about. Probably a few others too. To become an AutoCAD dealer, all you had to do was call and ask. Some of our customers bought AutoCAD as a dealer<g>; they also didn't really care who sold the product. About V2.5 or so (maybe 2.6) things got more complicated. Autodesk had lot's of dealers, but not a lot of people selling the product. They had a blip in sales and starting to treat the dealers who were actually selling the product a little better. Dealer relations tended to improve until a recent management change…. As far as how unwieldy a dealer channel can be, you might remember a company called KROY. The made those type on tape machines with the big round disks. They were selling through a dealer channel, and were flying along UNTIL they screwed their dealer channel, and I mean big time. If you'd like that whole story I'll email it to you, but the final result was after they screwed the dealers, the dealers stopped promoting the product, and promoted another (heard of Merlin or Brother P Touch)? Kroy was bankrupt in less than 18 months, and clue less about why it happened. I can tell you that our advertising and promotion budget for Kroy went from $22K/yr to 0, and this was in the seventies when 22K was real money. —///Andy Fredrick