Chris Williams's Profile

Flyboy - a spiff is not paid to recommend a particular product. It is a simply a commission paid on various products. They vary by product, usually if a store has them on one product, they have them on all products. They usually are designed to push sales people into selling products that either a) they have too many of, or b) make more money on. Yes manufacturers can supplement them, but that is very rare. They prefer to discount. That makes a Zune more profitable for Best Buy, that makes Best Buy want to increase the spiff. It's the salesperson who is being an idiot, preferring to sell an inferior product because they get $3 more commission. When that customer feels screwed, that $3 will look pretty stupid. I see Zunes all the time, I live in MSFT-land, and they get an employee discount. But I see far more MSFT'ers with iPods than non-MSFT'ers with Zunes.

Interestingly enough, I have a business and use Quicken for my personal life and Quickbooks for the business. In considering the move to Mac, I called Intuit to ask about support for the products. Quicken was obvious, use the Mac version (they said). But what about Quickbooks? After much time with the guy talking to his supervisor *they* recommended that I use Parallels for the Quickbooks -- it is the officially supported way to run Quickbooks on the Mac. Wonder if other companies that make Mac versions of their programs today will cop out and decide that Parallels gives them a way out? I can see them saying -- "let's put our Mac resources into making our Windows versions great and recommend Parallels". Thoughts?