I know, which is why I said exactly that in my post =)

That said, I prefer vendors that simply charge everyone the same reasonable price, rather than having such a large profit margin that they can afford to:

1) Pay a sales team to finagle over quotes.

2) Slash their prices on demand.

Obviously, things are a bit different when you're buying in truly massive quantities.

Then Dell gave us a sales manager and all sales had to go through him - to be fair he would often return our calls within a week or t least send an email saying he would call. And quotes through him were generally only 10-20% more than the website price once you had removed all the Server CALS and Office licenses that got added to every machine you asked for.

But of course he wouldn't sell you Latitude or whatever they were calling their low end machines because you were now a medium size customer. In the end we resorted to buying anything for the dev team from the outlet on credit card.