> the image processing badlands, where everything is proprietary, triply patented and only available under quintiplicately signed NDA. For a lot of the image sensors you can't even freely get the "marketing copy" version of the datasheet, let alone a full datasheet.
A friend of mine took a job as a "sales representative" for a company that makes microchips to be used in missiles.
Her duties were to respond to people who contacted her to ask about pricing. This meant determining who they were and what company they represented, and checking them against a list of known customers. Or, if they weren't already a known customer, verifying the existence of their company. In either case, she'd inform them of the price and then have to record the steps taken, the fact that a price was released, and the company the price was released to.
What I found slightly surreal about all this was the fact that, despite the intense paperwork requirements, there was only one price (per product). Everyone got the same price. It is not obvious to me why so much effort is devoted to maintaining the secrecy of a uniform price, especially when strangers are allowed to contact you and learn the price.
(Also of note, my friend was trained by her predecessor that, because it was so much work to verify incorporation papers, it was fine to just release the price to an unknown customer and do the verification when and if the customer actually wanted to make a purchase.)
A friend of mine took a job as a "sales representative" for a company that makes microchips to be used in missiles.
Her duties were to respond to people who contacted her to ask about pricing. This meant determining who they were and what company they represented, and checking them against a list of known customers. Or, if they weren't already a known customer, verifying the existence of their company. In either case, she'd inform them of the price and then have to record the steps taken, the fact that a price was released, and the company the price was released to.
What I found slightly surreal about all this was the fact that, despite the intense paperwork requirements, there was only one price (per product). Everyone got the same price. It is not obvious to me why so much effort is devoted to maintaining the secrecy of a uniform price, especially when strangers are allowed to contact you and learn the price.
(Also of note, my friend was trained by her predecessor that, because it was so much work to verify incorporation papers, it was fine to just release the price to an unknown customer and do the verification when and if the customer actually wanted to make a purchase.)