I'm not a salesman, I'm a TME/AE. The customers don't believe anything
that the salesperson says, but they have more confidence in an
engineer's statements. When you do competitive analysis in front of a
customer, you assume that they probably know everything you're going to
say, the key is to address the strengths and faults of the product
you're pushing, as well as the strengths and faults of the competitors
product, but in a way that shows that the customers needs are better
served by your product.

In this case, it was trying to win the socket for an embedded processor
that was less integrated but that had much higher performance and lower
power. They gave up the lower parts count and the lower price in
exchange for higher performance and lower power. Once one customer
switched to a higher performance solution, it was not long before their
competitors were switching too.

It's great to see products that you worked on out in the world, either
in stores or in use. The bummer is when something you worked on ends up
at the electronics surplus store, selling for 1/1000th of the production
cost!

[Copied to alt.cellular.attws. Please post all alt.cellular.cingular
posts to alt.cellular.attws as well. The Cingular name is going away,
and alt.cellular.attws is the proper venue for posts regarding AT&T's
Wireless Service.]