Sprint “Can’t afford to sell the Pre to the Wrong Customers”
By Will Park on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 3:15 PM PST In Hottest Hardware, Palm, Palm Pre, Rumors, Sprint, Web OS
It looks like this whole “limited supply on launch” situation is a serious problem for Sprint (NYSE: S). So serious, in fact, that Sprint’s leaked launch guide contains a page alerting Sprint sales reps to warning that they (Sprint and Palm (NSDQ: PALM)) “Can’t afford to sell the Pre to the Wrong Customers.” The Palm Pre should, according to Sprint, be sold to “non-IT centric business” customers.
Sprint is presumably trying to steer clear of any enterprise-related issues with the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre apparently isn’t as well suited for enterprise-duty as its Windows Mobile-powered cousin, the Palm Treo Pro. Sales reps are being instructed to keep the Palm Pre away from business users that need “extensive set of security policies” or central device management capabilities.
Aside from supply pressures, Sprint may be trying to avoid negative press on the Palm Pre during the critical “limited supply” sales cycle. If Palm does indeed ramp up Pre production to hit the holiday shopping season with force, they’ll want all the positive Pre-hype they can get during the Summer months.
If you’re an IT centric user that understands the drawbacks for the Palm Pre but still want to get your hands on the WebOS-powered smartphone, we’d recommend not mentioning anything about security policies or your company’s fleet of smartphones – lest you end up being pushed onto a Palm Treo Pro against your will.
[Via: Ubergizmo]
There seems to be a common misinterpretation of what exactly “We cant afford to sell the Pre to the wrong customer means”.
Had many of you bloggers actually *read* the guide and based your option on the *context* of said guide, you would quickly realize that they’re advising their sales staff not to sell the Pre to users who’s IT departments have specific critera that the Pre may not meet. Doing so would result in returns that aren’t necessary.
It wouldn’t make much sense to sell the Pre to a business user who’s IT department won’t deploy it on their infrastructure.
Read. Comprehend. Blog about it.
Did you happen to *read* the *context* of the article? If you *read* it, then you would see that Will gave the information that came from the guide. Maybe you read “We can’t afford to sell the Pre to the wrong customer” in another context, but I feel we reported it in the correct context.
Read. Comprehend. Comment about it.
No different than the iPhone, which should also not be sold where IT expects to remotely control all the devices.
True, but how do you stop someone from buying a phone they “really, really” want?