From SSKA Blog -- Twice a year there is a nice study on "Top Ten Mistakes
of Kiosk Deployment" and usually one of the top ones is the principle
that the number of problems you end up having are usually inversely
related to the money you spend. You buy cheap, you get cheap as a rule.
The usual threat there is "well, we can buy it from China for this
much...". You can buy something from China but it won't be the same,
and it'll take 12 weeks and won't accept modifications. Probably you can
forget about the Buy American ARRA incentives working here (I hope).
Buying kiosks
Worst than all that is prospects/customers that are not trying the
tactic of asking kiosk companies to fund the project and pay all the
upfront costs. It's called investing in the project (not unlike people
with brainstorm ideas looking for "strategic partners").
They''ll let us write the software for free, let us build the kiosks for
free, do the site surveys and installations and get it all in (on our
dime) and then they'll decide if they want to move forward, and if so,
whether or not they move forward with us (ie a company).
The good companies are too busy, too smart to participate in something
like that. I've seen it over and over where the expectation is the best
possible product and the budget is zero. And always the same result.
Sometimes due to lack of response the RFP gets re-issued, most of the
time they were just taking a shot (and not a very good one).
Am I missing something here?
Everybody Wants it for Free Syndrome
(...and insiders would say the part missing is the other half of deal which is we want it right now too...)
