baer@percival.UUCP (Ken Baer) (08/27/87)
Commodore has just announced one of their latest promotional efforts for the A500. They are about to send out a bunch of coupons to members of 64/128/Amiga usergroups, that entitle the bearer to a significant discount of software if they purchase an A500. The catch is that the coupon is NON-TRANSFERABLE! This policy works ok for the 64/128 owners who may want to upgrade, but it doesn't make sense for the thousands of Amiga club members. Most of us are quite happy with our A1000's and don't want to trade it for an A500. And many of us probably know people who would be able to use this coupon, and might not get an A500 without the inscentive. I feel that CBM is making a big mistake by making the coupons non-transferable. Maybe the coupons could be made available to people who join an Amiga club when they buy an A500. Our usergroup had a meeting last night, and this was the general feeling. We all want to see the Amiga do well in the marketplace, so how about it CBM? -- -Ken Baer. I'm a graduate now, so please hire me! USENET - ...tektronix!reed!percival!baer OR baer@percival.pdx.com "The Few, The Proud, The Criminally Insane - Oberlin Computer Science" - me.
dca@toylnd.UUCP (08/30/87)
In article <863@percival.UUCP>, baer@percival.UUCP (Ken Baer) writes: > Commodore has just announced one of their latest promotional efforts for the > A500. They are about to send out a bunch of coupons to members of 64/128/Amiga > usergroups, that entitle the bearer to a significant discount of software if > they purchase an A500. The catch is that the coupon is NON-TRANSFERABLE! This > policy works ok for the 64/128 owners who may want to upgrade, but it doesn't > make sense for the thousands of Amiga club members. ... This issue has been definitely beaten to death in this group already. Whether CBM made a policy blunder is certainly a debateable point. As I see it CBM is trying to suck loyal Commodore users that already have a large investment in software in their present computers into the Amiga market by offering them a 'deal they can't refuse'. The deal they are offering essentially allows these people to get a boat load of software pretty much equivalent in value to the price of the A500 they have to purchase. Any sort of profit that they are making on the deal must be necessarily slim. Therefore, offering it as a general incentive would probably not be wise especially because it would piss off all the vendors selling competing software to that in the bundle. Certainly, selling it to Amiga groups would be a little silly as many of them would buy the A500 just to get the software. They would get little revenue, raise the ire of multitudes of software vendors, and virtually no expansion of the customer base which is probably the point of this whole exercise. When preferential treatment is given to any one group it is always irritating to those outside of it. But I for one can certainly deal better with (Commodore 64/128 owner) than (happens to be friend of Commodore 64/128 owner). Allowing the coupons to be transferable would be a very arbitrary type of deal rather than the pretty focused deal they seem to have now. For that matter we might see people scalping their coupons. If they were to get that arbitrary I think they ought to make it a general incentive (and I don't think that was the idea). As to the wisdom of the deal in general THAT is something I can't begin to decide on. David Albrecht