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Comment by carstenhag | Hacker News Reader

Nah, even purchasing a 500€/$ piece of anything involves a lot of talking, procurement and waiting. At least in most german companies.

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Sure, but even in German companies if you want to purchase a 500€ piece of software there's a procurement process that you can go through.

There's no process for buying a laptop for an open-source dev who's code the business depends on but who is not an employee, so especially in German companies, you don't do that.

Well, correct, you wouldn't buy it for a donation

You would usually proceed as a donation from inventory or you'd give them some type of credit for purchase (might come off the marketing dept)

When donating something never go with the more expensive option (in this case, actually going and buying something you make on the market)

Can’t you donate the money and then they buy the hardware?

If by "you" you mean "the corporation", then no. A software BU doesn't make donations. It can purchase things, which is the point of the quoted comment, but it can't just give money away.

From a corporate accounting perspective, a "purchase" is "we pay money and we get a thing". Sometimes the thing needs to fit a stereotype; "a hardware", "a service", "a contract", but the dance is the same; request a quote, get a quote, place an order, get an invoice, pay the invoice, get a receipt, get confirmation of delivery.

Iff the transaction fits that mold, then it's generally straightforward. If it doesn't, then you need to find someone with the power to override the organisation; in an organisation resistant to internal tampering ("corruption") that can be quite difficult.

Could you elaborate on that? I am not German but a few months ago I contacted a German company because we use their open source products and want to move to their new SaaS model. Instead of being the typical few clicks automatic experience they start to engage in a personal conversation to define the correct price. From the business perspective I couldn’t understand their approach, it surely kills more sales.

Could it be something with European privacy laws for storing data?

I wish we could just buy licenses sometimes ... I really hate fucking around with procurement processes

I think this is why US way of business is unique in terms of business and goes beyond Europe or Germany specifically. US (as a multicultural platform) pushes toward the acquisition of the good, BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) approach. It should be fast and will be faster. There is a lot of criticism about credit debt but US offers a lot of credit, the problem is more about how education and health were inflated that to credit itself. (IMHO). This is not about nationality but context of business.

This is really common for b2b sales, it gives you both flexibility to negotiate price and terms, especially for more complex/niche products or services.

It is not common if we are competing with multiple companies where you sign up and onboard in 5’.

If you are taking a company to a Saas solution costing XXXXX euros surely it would be worthwhile to spend a couple of hours investigating how you get the best price?

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