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Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

Leading contender for actual quote:

     "... we expected to get orders for five [IBM 701] machines, we came home with orders for 18."

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Out of the 20 potential customers they pitched to.

So they were counting on a 25% success rate and got 90%.

I wonder if it caused any issues. Getting 3 times the amount of orders can be great, but it can also be pyrrhic victory, depending on your ability to deliver.

With this order size there is no public pricing information. So if you can't deliver fast enough you would adjust prices or specifically charge more for the first few delivery slots.

Compare it to ordering very high price items with long lead time like airliners, you pay for a specific delivery slot, not just the item at a random moment. And you can buy options to more deliveries in a specific timeframe, which influences the price of your order.

At the time (if TFA is correct) the 701 had already existed for a year. So it was only a question of building more of them, not that they had sold 5 vs 18 of something that didn't exist yet. But, they were also most likely on the hook for installing and running them -- at that time a computer like that would have been leased with installation services and on-site operations staff included.

No, it did not cause any issues.

From a salescritter's perspective, that is frankly not their problem.

The premise of the article (if it can be called that) is incorrect. He made the statement about the 5 computers in a TV interview (and it was not related to business trip referred in the article). I saw the recording of the interview some 10-15 years ago. Don’t remember which network. Perhaps NBC?

Well, the article is certainly better sourced than you thinking you saw a counter example 10-15 years ago on TV.

What you say doesn’t make sense at all. The article describes a shareholder meeting in 1953, when IBM was already aware that the market is much bigger. It had to happen significantly earlier, but not later than in 1940s, because the concept of programmable electronic machine (a computer, not calculator) was established only then. And they were selling a lot of calculators by then. At that time there was no such thing as TV broadcasting casually interviewing various people.

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