Any evidence of this? Everytime someone mentions this, I ask, and I get no evidence. If this kind of allegation was true, I'd expect tonnes of publications to jump on this.
> our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult
I perceive this as equivalent to my company trying to buy 100 displays straight from Samsung and then alleging that it is hard to do. It is all about volume. Even a 1000 and they won't talk to you. It has to be in the 100k volumes before the actual device vendors talk to you. Otherwise you go through distributors just like everyone else.
Well we regularly buy LCD panels in large and small quantities from big manufacturers, and distributors, in order to integrate them into our industrial PCs. While we are not a household name, we're big in our niche and I'd say we have industry experience.
I was not on the project and I'm not in purchasing, so I don't know the details, but from what I heard it was quite odd. The vendor (not e-ink, but a downstream integrator) was first willing to sell thousands of units, we got a devkit from them and started developing. But suddenly they were like "What is your business plan sir?" and "I'm afraid we cannot sell at the moment". The quantity was not the problem, they sounded like they were not happy with the use case.
The reason you never see hard evidence is that there is no evidence to be found - it's just that the vendors behave "odd" and are picky with whom they sell to.
> I was not on the project and I'm not in purchasing, so I don't know the details, but from what I heard it was quite odd.
Ok.
> The vendor (not e-ink, but a downstream integrator) was first willing to sell thousands of units, we got a devkit from them and started developing. But suddenly they were like "What is your business plan sir?" and "I'm afraid we cannot sell at the moment". The quantity was not the problem, they sounded like they were not happy with the use case.
If my purchasing team gave an explanation like that, I'd be suspicious of the purchasing team. I've seen scenarios where the "distributor" didn't actually have the quantity in the timeframe they promised as they weren't a top tier distributor. So the purchasing guy who had some kind of relationship with that distributor was coming up with lots of crazy reasons to keep delaying until we finally found out. As always, the simplest explanation is not "vendors behaving odd and being picky about who they sell to", I've never seen a vendor being unwilling to sell as long as you are offering market price for that quantity.
Any evidence of this? Everytime someone mentions this, I ask, and I get no evidence. If this kind of allegation was true, I'd expect tonnes of publications to jump on this.
> our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult
I perceive this as equivalent to my company trying to buy 100 displays straight from Samsung and then alleging that it is hard to do. It is all about volume. Even a 1000 and they won't talk to you. It has to be in the 100k volumes before the actual device vendors talk to you. Otherwise you go through distributors just like everyone else.