Re:What Microchip doesn't (officially) tell you about the VS...
by stephen_g on Tuesday July 08, 2025 @08:51AM
(#44499484)
They don’t care about ‘upselling’ - it’s just that they only really care about the orders that are at least in the tens of thousands of units (or for the Broadcoms of the world, hundreds of thousands) per year, and ongoing.
If you even promise to buy a few hundred a year through a business, it puts you in a different category and everything gets much easier, but you usually have to go via a distributor (Avnet, Future, Arrow etc.). But if you’re big enough (the hundreds of thousands + qtys) these companies will actually send dedicated support engineers to work with you and help you integrate their parts into your product.
How do you upsell a hardware engineer who just wants to buy a specific chip, and already has everything to evaluate and use it? You don't. So you force everyone to go through sales, and then sales wants to talk to non-engineering higher-ups, and then the upsell happens - while the people who actually knew what they wanted remain as far away as possible.
And if you don't have the pockets deep enough for the sales dept to acknowledge your existence, then you might as well not exist.