I think nerds respond the same way to the same slick advertising messages, the difference is just our compulsion to put specs in a spreadsheet or run it through a graphing package before making the final decision. Which could be solved easily at no detriment to the polish if every product had a machine-readable spec file to download via a tiny link at the bottom of the page.
It would have the added benefit of making sure product aggregators always have correct and up-to-date information. I don't understand why pretty much every company gate-keeps their catalogs so much. I worked on a project where we had to pay big money every month to a third party for such a dataset, because apparently companies hate selling large amounts of products to customers who want to automate the purchasing process with their ERP systems.
Then they cant: change prices on your, negotiate with you via raising the price of something you care less about to make up some profit, mislead competition about what's happening (who is also probably scraping anyway.)
> Then they cant: change prices on your, negotiate with you via raising the price of something you care less about to make up some profit
Surely they can do all of that without making engineers spend valuable time thumbing through paper, PDF or excruciatingly slow web catalogs to write down SKUs. To be fair, some engineering suppliers have started to see the utter retardation of that system, and have actually started to offer things like CAD files. But most industries still act as if they hate selling things to customers.
> mislead competition about what's happening (who is also probably scraping anyway.)
That's probably the biggest factor. Or prevent customers from comparing prices on equivalent products with competitors. But that's still stupid since everyone does it anyway, they just have to do it manually, scrape or pay third parties for the data. Not to mention that competitors often go as far as buying entire units to pull apart.
I'm not an MBA, so there's probably some obscure but really important nuance that I'm missing, but my naive understanding is that cash flow is kind of a big deal. The sooner you can turn the investment in a project, product or service into cash the better, so you want to do everything you can to make the conversion process as smooth as possible. I've been on the other side of the equation too, working for suppliers of pretty awesome products that didn't sell very well because nobody thought about this. Things like why would anyone want to buy SaaS that takes months to on-board because nothing is automated, when others just let you spin up an instance and get started in minutes? Not to mention that the only way people could find out about the product is if they happened to be cold called by a salesman.
It would have the added benefit of making sure product aggregators always have correct and up-to-date information. I don't understand why pretty much every company gate-keeps their catalogs so much. I worked on a project where we had to pay big money every month to a third party for such a dataset, because apparently companies hate selling large amounts of products to customers who want to automate the purchasing process with their ERP systems.