Do you guys have any idea how much cost a full color page adv at the any electronic news magazine? something around $3k, per issue!!! and some companies like Texas, Maxim, ST, and others do it every single issue, not in only one magazine, all year around. They are trying to show their products to people that even don't need it, they call it "semi-directed spreading ad". When you subscribe to some of those companies, like Maxim, Texas and others, they keep sending you monthly news brochures about technical news and notices in a special paper, color printed, and full of details. Do you know how much cost it? how much cost the mail to send it to approximately 50 or perhaps more than 200 thousand guys? who knows? Are you saying, that to keep one person working full time job just packing a couple of free chips, sticking address labels printed from an automated service is too expensive? Compared to the strong marketing it can do, touching the right persons directly, charging for it or sending it for free just don't change *nothing* in their budget. How many chips do you really think maxim mail for free per year? 100 thousand? it will cost them less than just *one* engineer year salary, doesn't make sense to use that kind of marketing? Do you know how much cost to print those heavy 800 pages chip tech spec catalogs? Internet web sites saved them at least 300 thousand / year, or much more, can you guess? (using pdf). Come on, just wake up, companies like that have advertisement budget bigger than a couple million dollars per year, and they need to apply that where it is more important. I CAN NOT RECOMMEND ANY CHIP IF I DON'T KNOW HOW IT WORKS!!! Simple as that! I have a small company, I do lots of researches, and sometimes we produce thousand of devices, but this quantity is not important for those companies? No company just born producing billions of devices from one day to another, and even if they do, they use engineers that (and please bold that words) THEY DO KNOW those components from somewhere else, sometimes from their own hobby small bench installed in a corner of their kitchen, playing with those components from midnight to 2 or 3 in the morning... Please, tell me that I am wrong, all engineer people never used at their company projects what they did learn alone during the cold nights at home? I am wrong? I can't be. Just a question: Suppose it was impossible to get parts in quantity less than a reel with a 5 hundred pieces, that would happens to distribution? Just an answer: Would collapse selling old AC126 transistors, 7400 TTL gates, 4000 series Cmos, and 8004 cpus!!! It is that simple. People buy bananas because they know the taste, and they would not buy 5 hundred bananas just for the fun to try it, right? Not even in a big company like IBM, I already worked there!!! Here it goes, posted and stamped. ------------------------------------- Wagner Lipnharski - UST Research Inc. Orlando, Florida - http://ustr.net ------------------------------------- ryan pogge wrote: > > > Giving those people the chips for free > >would not benifit Maxim. > > of course it does. > it costs them a few cents to do it and then if one of us > makes something that we wish to selll we use their chips..... > > And with that the problem arises how to differ > >between "one only" and those who are potential "thousands" customers. So > >they don't. > > They DO! what are you talking about.... they even have a web form to fill > out for free samples. > > >By the way : The cost of maintaining the above service is quite high too > > maybee it is. > > >Greetz, > > Rudy Wieser