Is There A Need For Someone Selling Computers To Be A Technician Or Is A Computer Just Like A Washing Machine?


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The function of a salesman is to sell goods. Salesmen that are not proficient in in the art of selling end up not making sales. This is true whether the salesperson is selling cars, white goods, or computers. Car salesmen are not required to be motor mechanics so why ought we believe computer salesmen to also be a skilled computer technician?

Whenever anything goes wrong with a car while it is under warranty we return it to the car sales yard and they organise their motor mechanics to fix it. A computer shop usually is a one or two man operation so if they were to employ a technician to fix the problems then there are less people doing the selling, sales decline, and prices have to surge to offset. Many bigger computer retailers do employ technicians and their prices as you would expect are often larger than the cheaper one and two man operations.

With a smaller concern, the salesperson do have to double as technicians or they run into real difficulties when anything stops working correctly on a computer they just sold. Another argument is that there are scarcely any distinct models of car but every computer is different. Even two computers of identical hardware setup often have some differences in the software installed on them. With computers, even the sequence in which various software is loaded can affect the operation of the computer. Install software product A before software product B and all runs fine. Install software product B first and then when product A gets installed critical files get clobbered and the system totally stuffs up.

The real difficulty is that salesperson don't make good technicians. They are very unlike skills so if someone is proficient at one, they are often lousy at the other. I (for example) make a very poor salesman.
Another impact of salesperson not being technicians is that lots of them do not even grasp the terminology associated with the product they are trying to sell. This is all very well for classic product ranges such as cars (which only have a few optional extras) but computers literally have millions of likely variations that you may wish to order. If the shop assistant doesn't comprehend what these are then how can they make the sale. Some shops get around this problem by selling computers like a commodity item, you either buy one of the standard variants or you go elsewhere. They lose sales that way when their standard versions don't meet your needs.

I was at a PC show a few years ago. On one of the stands was a glass cabinet holding three motherboards. That was the entire content of the stand. They weren't actually retailing anything at the show, they were just showing these three motherboards. I asked the chap on the stand if one of the motherboards had bus-mastering. He couldn't address the query because he didn't understand what bus-mastering was. He wasn't there to sell anything but he still managed to lose his company a potential future sale. Made me wonder what exactly he was there for.

I don't have a fix to this problem and I doubt that anyone else does. The predicament hasn't resolved itself as computers have become more standardized, it has just changed. Now there large numbers of people who get a basic computer to run basic software to perform a few simple operations that only use a small fraction of the capability of the cheapest available computer being talked into buying a much more expensive computer by the salesperson because he and they don't know any better.

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