[michaelt]

> I'm convinced that it was nothing less than business collusion.

Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?

If you're a farmer in the market for a $200k combine harvester, sales guys will be happy to put you in a $200-a-night hotel so you can attend their invite-only presentation on how their latest models give you 10% more yield with 30% lower labour cost thanks to the new auto-steer mechanism and six-stage threshing mechanism. And they'll hand-hold you through all the calculations to write a business case.

[samplatt]

>Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?

Considering how much the sales division of many medium and large companies dictates the direction of the whole company, "sales meeting" and "business collusion" is often the same thing.

I've worked for FAR too many companies that have lost $60million in support and maintenance on a sub-par product that sales managed to sell for $30million gross... and then the sales division (and upper management) leave the company for something better. What a surprise.

[zavec]

Now I'm trying to remember what that tech company (I think pretty small, startup-sized ish but large enough that they would normally have at least one person in sales) that just straight up decided not to have a sales department was

[HelloNurse]

A "sales meeting", intended in a loose sense, can cause involuntary and/or uncoordinated pseudo-collusion because it aligns various parties: a level playing field of information (e.g. convincing important managers of many companies that their strategy needs more AI and less actual experts) leads to similar forecasts and similar decisions.

[bushbaba]

You don’t have sales meetings from a vendor on a cruise ship in the west. Thats considered bribery

[bboygravity]

Well this is an extremely naive take.

You can rest assured that bribery in that way is extremely common in the West.

[red-iron-pine]

and balls out about it, too.

used to be a sales engineer at an ISP. one you've heard of. we had account execs straight up offer "referral agent fees" to the network managers we were selling to.

bandwith is mostly the same -- 10Gbps here is more or less 10Gbps elsewhere -- so you gotta set yourself apart. and it worked. constantly.

[theshrike79]

You call it "training" and it's all good.

[HSO]

LOL ok call it a "conference" then

Or better yet: a "summit"

[hdgvhicv]

Yes it’s at vegas instead.

[saagarjha]

Where do you think the sales meetings happen lol

[KingMob]

I conduct my sales meetings in open sewers. There may be whiffs of garbage, but not impropriety.

[baq]

Sir.

[inetknght]

> Are you sure you didn't just see a sales meeting?

It's possible!

[dachris]

It is, but cui bono. I know that local software companies in my city had meetings coordinating the local software dev wage level. There's no reason to assume something like this isn't going on at a larger scale too.

[arresin]

Is that strictly legal?

[consp]

Almost nowhere. But hard to prove in court. You should report it to the local authorities at least.

[nradov]

Nonsense. There's nothing generally illegal about vendor sponsored junkets for private industry attendees. Some companies have policies against their own employees attending such events but that's not a legal issue.

[toyg]

Yeah, everyone knows Jobs' mistake was to use email. This kinda thing is done very unofficially.

[franktankbank]

LOL. Or do the early 1900s thing and kick somebodies ass badly.