In an informative interview with CRN magazine, Autodesk's next CEO Carl Bass share his thoughts on the role of resellers in the Internet age. One of the key ideas he expressed was a willingness to protect VAR's from having to sell immature software.
The reason we have even 15 percent--there’s two reasons, and we're very clear to everybody about the two reasons. One is when products are new products, early to market products, we want to really subsidize those products. We want to bring them to market. No version one product is ever a great product. Version two products are OK, version three are the good ones. It's really expensive for a reseller to go through that selling and reselling of versions one, two and three. Also, to the extent possible, we want as much feedback possible to our development teams. So we want our own sales force in there, we want our own consulting organization. We want to learn as much as possible so we can really get to release three as soon as we can. And when we get to release three, then we want it to get to the channel.
You can read the entire interview at
Computer Reseller News' website.