Palm has recently announced that it plans to end it’s “Minimum Advertised Price(MAP)” policy effective June the 1st. Cutting a long story short, an MEP is a manufacturer’s policy that aims to hinder retailers to sell devices at price points lower than a specific point(to prevent price battles).
Apparently, the orange folks never did too good a job at enforcing their policy - all recently-released Palm devices have fallen significantly below the list price very quickly.
Seeing Palm give up this policy is great from my point of view - it shows that the orange folks finally start to understand that they are not Apple(even though they have many ex-Apple employees :-)). Having list prices that are sky-high and rock-bottom over-the-counter prices(sometimes as little as 50% of the official MSRP) is a very bad sign IMHO…and seeing Palm understand this definitely is a step in the right direction…
It almost certainly won’t have any appreciable effect… It just means retailers can set their prices without that little twinge of in their heads that they are disobeying the manufacturer.
Hi medevilenemy,
in fact, it may:
Even though manufacturers can not force developers or sellers to do anything, they can just refuse to ship further stuff.
This happened in Germany with the price of C&C3, and Palm currently does it to me in regards to interviews…
Best regards
Tam Hanna
I do like the fact that palm is bringing down their prices. I work for sprint and I’ve had to help lpenty of people set up their centros recently.