On August 9, 2009 at 01:01, JonW747 said...
Yeah, with Fujitsu no longer selling Plasmas it must be hard to find a TV manufacturer who will provide a protected line to custom installers...
I dont really care that Fujitsu is no longer a protected line. If they were for sale at the gas station i would still champion them. What concerns me is that i can no longer spec a plasma TV with 100% confidence that it will preform well. Fujitsu was an outstanding product. The display quality has only recently been beaten by current Kuro's and sadly those will also be gone very soon. Fujitsu's discreet IR commands and RS-232 protocol worked perfectly and remained the same for as long as i can remember. This means i only had to eat the labor involved on learning the product once. Every other time i spec'd it i was able to just know it would do what it was supposed to do. This is much more important to me than markup. Money lost on labor puts us further in the hole than any CE product we have ever sold.
Heck, the Pioneer KRP line which was meant to be targeted to CI's was released to retailers earlier in the year, and I hear a lot of restrictions have been dropped from the Elite line as well.
Palnews26 made a solid point. The economic climate changes the whole game, but if as a CI your reputation and work stands on its own, then it shouldn't matter one bit to you.
Besides, wouldn't you rather be able to recommend the best equipment to your customers and not just the stuff that you can arrange to re sell?
I work for a successful CI firm. We adapt and change with the reality of the market. We get paid for every minute of our time spent with clients. We bill for system design, GUI creation, installation and programming. we do not bid projects. You hire us or you don't. This has been policy for a decade so the profit lost on a TV does not affect our bottom line. To be quite honest we typically lose money on CE products even when they had high markup because we eat the labor involved with defective products and reinventing the wheel each year with the new model change. If a client wants to assume the risk that was forced on us to save $ i wont stop them.
Every product we recommend to our clients is the best equipment available. Our knowledge and expertise allows us to take an ordinary product and give our clients a richer experience with it than they would have gotten with someone else. Sometimes we choose products that are dealer protected and sometimes we don't. We don't concern ourselves with anything other than providing the best product.
