OT: Coilcraft still doesn't get it

Jim,

Points well taken.

- The Dimensions link will be fixed this morning.

- The difference between the 146 and 150 Series is simply their electrical values, which are shown in the data table. The 146 parts also have silver in the lead plating.

- The tuning slug has a slot rather than a hex, and yes, we should (and will) dimension that. Of course we sell our own special tuning tool made just for these parts. 8^)

I do appreciate your taking the time to point out these glitches. If you find any more, please be sure to pass them along.

Regards,

John Stellberg COILCRAFT Director of Marketing Communications

Joerg,

Thanks for the feedback.

Tracking programs like HitBox are essential tools for webmasters. I use it constantly to gauge interest in our various products, help me rearrange the location of pages to improve traffic, determine what countries our site visitors are coming from, and so on. Yes, we could use server log files for analysis, but that's far more cumbersome and doesn't offer real-time, ad-hoc reporting.

You'd be hard pressed to find ANY other passive component maker that even offers pricing on their own site; usually they require you to visit their distributors' sites. The registration is a one-time only process, and it sets a cookie that pre-fills every other form you might use on our site, for free samples, technical questions, etc. Personally, I use Google Toolbar and RoboForm to fill out forms like this with one click.

The distributor question is one we consider regularly, but to date we've decided to remain our own distributor. Not only do we maintain a far broader and deeper inventory than any distributor possibly could, but we have the most liberal free sample policy in the industry, giving away hundreds of thousands of parts each year that customers would otherwise have had to purchase from Digi-Key, etc. I definitely will relay your thoughts to management, however.

Regards,

John Stellberg COILCRAFT Director of Marketing Communications

Joel,

Eagle eyes! Those are being fixed as I type this. And yes, those were definitely copy and paste errors.

John Stellberg COILCRAFT Director of Marketing Communications

Joel,

Because we never know whether the CD is going to be viewed on a 640x480 or 1600x1200 display, we opted to have it open maximized. Eliminating the browser toolbar was more of an aesthetic decision that we'll definitely reconsider next time.

As for those pricey new conical inductors, if you ever saw how difficult those little guys are to make, you'd understand. Let's just say yields aren't what we'd hope for yet.

Regards,

John Stellberg COILCRAFT Director of Marketing Communications

runs

you'll

possible

Here's my take: Don't mess with forcing maximised and removing toolbars. You're dealing (mostly) with engineers - I think we know how to navigate a browser :)

I've been known the throw CDs in the trash (and cancel subscriptions) because the vendor insisted on setting my screen for me when I am perfectly capable of doing it for myself.

I don't *want* to use ALT-TAB - I want to move the window a little. There are times I want the browser window AND my design window (or a spice window, or - you get the picture) viewable at the same time. If your (or anyone else's for that matter) viewing tool forces me to view it fullscreen or nothing, that tool will get promptly deleted, along with a possible design win.

Cheers

PeteS

Me too, very nice! I allow my banks and credit card companies, no one else.

...Jim Thompson

WHAT! You don't distribute your competitor's stuff, too?

How narrow.

:-)

Oh dear............................

martin

Y'know, this is an opportunity for you.

Instead of failing on such searches, you should pop up a page that says "that's a Coiltronics part" -- then at least have some canned blurb on how Coilcraft is just the coolest company in the world to buy from, or better yet give a listing of some Coilcraft equivalents.

And to think that you didn't buy them from Coilcraft, for no good reason. ;-)

Hello John,

Maybe your IT guys could streamline that server log process :-)

Hitbox is indeed used a lot but it seems to slow things down. An example of a large company using it is TI. Case in point: Once I had such a hard time using that site that I went to National, found a similarly priced part and that won the design-in. My design-in rate for many EU companies has dropped to nearly zero, mostly because of very poor web site performance or unavailability of budgetary pricing, among other serious issues they have.

That's one reason why it is so valuable for them to be in the Digikey program. We have instant price information from there. Price is often the paramount figure for a part during the design process so people need that information as fast as they can click. Or as the old saying goes "time is money".

For sample requests I certainly understand registration. But not for pricing.

Sure, but that will not work when I am at a client. I can't possibly ask them to load some new gadget onto their PC.

I am a proponent of a direct sales strategy. However, in electronics that can only work when budgetary pricing is available at our fingertips. Such as it is with National, TI, Analog Devices and so on.

Another fact that I see during almost every single consulting assignment is that clients prefer a one stop order. Ideally all the stuff on a design should be listed and in stock at one single supplier, or at the most two. During the protoype phase that is so decisive for a design-win these suppliers typically are Digikey, Mouser or Newark. Clients don't care much about whether a sample qty is free or not, they just want to be sure it's all there next morning.

Thanks! I wish other manufacturers would participate or at least monitor forums like this. Many of the engineers out here make design decisions that stick for a decade or more, big $$.

Just want to be helpful here. One thought for management: What would be so bad about listing the pricing info? After all, any competitor worth their salt already knows that stuff anyhow.

Hello John,

Just a hint re newsgroups: Posting your real email address can lead to lots of spam. Spambots don't crawl usenet much but this newsgroup gets copied into the web a lot and then your address is exposed. What most people do is munging, to an extent that a spambot can't figure it out but engineers still can.

Here you say you are a component maker so it is great that you even have some pricing on your site, but

here you say you are your own distributor, so now you really have to compare your website with the pricing info available at other "distributor" sites, such as Digikey and Mouser (and the lack of registration required there), not other manufacturer's sites. You really can't cherry pick when to call yourselves a manufacturer vs. a distributor if you have no other distributors - the distributor level is what most non-purchasing-agent customers interact with so that's where you will lose sales. Just another way to present the argument to management. And count me in as another vote against registration just to get basic catalog info and pricing up to some moderate quantity like

PS Thanks for your free sample policy, it really helped me out a few years ago.

-- Regards, Carl Ijames carl.ijames at verizon.net

A more flexible solution is to type 'about:config' in your address bar, and then set the dom.disable_window_* parameters.

vic

"Joerg" skrev i en meddelelse news:tpayg.182821$F snipped-for-privacy@newssvr29.news.prodigy.net...

Well, I use the real address; the ISP kill most of the spam and "spambayes" does the rest.

Hello Frithiof Andreas,

Huh? Looks a bit munged as well.

I kind of stopped doing that after it flushed some important business email. So now I delete about 40 spams every morning and around 10-20 during the day. I also don't use any filter here on usenet, never felt the need to.

So does recent Netscape with pop-up blocker. They seem to want to be appreciated for their "hard work". fortunately you can set Netscape to just count them.

AJAX is the new darling of the Web world; javascript required.