EDITORIAL FORM AN IBM DEALER

[Anonymous]

The Ugly Face of the New Inter-mediation on the Web.
I remember when I first learned the term dis-intermediation. The dealers were being chased out of the market because of the “seller direct” model of buying. In doing so, the user community lost a great asset. The fact that the dealer would act as your agent for support meant YOU didn’t have to wait on hold to speak with Asia. Hail to the dealer who is MORE than a mere reseller!How did our real, robust, and reliable market get obscured by the internet? What happened to that which we all miss from prior days? The endless indexing and sublinking of the internet these days is becoming calcified and ineffective. That is a bold statment, but I find it mostly true. The game of the connected www is about cash and algorithms.The robots that crawl through the connections love to gobble up info so that any page can be found when doing a search of these massive indexes. Each indexor: Google, MSN, Yahoo, et al, has its own formulae to provide what they think are the best results. Ah! but who detrimines “best”? The frequency and duration of your stay? the number of cross links? the keyword density? These formulae will determine what will show up in the top of any search results. And it’s a moving target!

So how does one show up high on a search?
Two ways– both expensive.Oh and how expensive it is, buying my way to be found. I spend more now on Google-Ads then I ever did on advertsing in the past 21 years. Space is sold to the highest bidder and we bid our own cost of eyeballs ever higher.So several months ago I began the tedious and expensive process to ween myself off of advertising on the search engines, in favor of web-promotion. (Web-promotion is not a silk-cocoon closeout:)If you want to be “found”, be prepared to pay to climb a different ladder. The “organic” or “natural” search are the left side results of index searches. They are found on the left side of the results page. The ones on the top and right side are the paid advertisers. So, why is it always the same general bunch showing up on top of the organic search results pages? Have you seen what webprogrammers charge just to prepare you for web site promotion? Expensive new “utility bills” of website promotion soon to follow.

So who do we find on top of the search results for equipment in our markets?
It’s always the same firms! They are selling stuff they don’t ever own! THEY have become the new intermediaters. They who have little or NO investment in the products they sell. Yet we, whose inventories support the long term, are increasingly harder to find within this medium.I pine for the paradigm of old. Relationships and trust supported, nurtured, and grew our robust infrastucture. The appearance of impropriety and arms-length commerce that came with the internet tipped the buyer-beware credo of everyone for himself. Years of experience, company reputation, the character of the person, the product knowledge of the dealer, all used to matter.

Where are the middlemen? On the top of the search engines.

David T. Mendelson
Argecy Computer Corporation
27280 Haggerty Road C21
Farmington Hills, MI 48331
248-324-1800 x122
248-324-1900 fax
http://www.argecy.com

[Author]

August 3, 2006 at 12:08 PM