The issue here is "product tying".
The
point of an open interface like
DMX is to make it possible to buy your
console from one company, and your dimmers/fixtures from a different one; a process which we have decided as a society is to be encouraged.
What this does is make it difficult to actually *exercise* this freedom, because people who make competing consoles can't in fact compete with you on price -- you're taking advantage of popularity at one end of the
wire to sell stuff at the other end that people don't like as much.
Whether it's "unfair" advantage is the question.
Decisions like the Lexmark Toner case suggest perhaps it is.
The opposite case could be made that for the most streamlined support,
purchase everything from the same manufacturer when possible. As opposed to fifteen devices in the same
system by different manufacturers, and when something goes awry, every manufacturer blames the other manufacturers instead of helping diagnose the problems.
Another factor on the table against diversifying your product manufacturers except where necessary is cost. Some manufacturers offer a given contractor a rebate at the end of the calendar or fiscal year. Sell $xxx,xxx of their product, and they give you 10% back. Sell $x,xxx,xxx of their product, and you get 20% back. Another pricing incentive to stay loyal to a given manufacturer is if you order $xx,xxx at a time, they'll give you an xx% discount on the order. These pricing structures makes it more difficult for a vendor to be competitive if they sell a little
bit of everyone's products, versus if they focus their offerings into a couple select manufacturers. It's easy to look at this as the vendor being unfair to their customers with their offerings and getting bonuses, but it's also easy to look at as so long as the vendors hit their sales goals, they can bid lower on projects knowing they'll get their money back.
As I digress further into the ilky underworld of discussing procurement practices, I'll say this -- when I talk to clients, integrators (bidders), and consultants, I almost never hear people begging for diversity in their systems' manufacturers. Due to price structuring, volume discounts/rebates, logistics, support, and so on, almost everyone I've encountered prefers the fewer manufacturers, the better. Projects that lack focus in the product selection end up more complicated and time-consuming to design, more logistically cumbersome to support, and more time-consuming for potential bidders to bid on (which translates into fewer bids, or bids are that intentionally marked up to
cover the bidders'
butt if things get messy later in the project).
What the argument of sole-sourcing more practically comes down to is one manufacturer's all-encompassing solution over another manufacturer's all-encompassing solution. Not one manufacturer's
console driving another manufacturer's
network protocol driving another manufacturer's dimmers and yet another manufacturer's moving lights, and yet another manufacturer is providing the architectural lighting
system to be integrated with the performance lighting
system, which is all controlled by yet another manufacturer's control
system. Over time, some facilities end up with these types of systems as they progress because add-ons or upgrades are done in segments by different people over stretches of time -- but nobody on the front end is begging for these systems as their "ideal solution."
This is partly why manufacturers sometimes have robust Applications Engineering departments. So long as the bid process doesn't prohibit it, a bidder could show up with a consultants'
ETC design, take it to
Strand's application engineering department and have
Strand "flip it" for them. Or vise versa. Replace
ETC and
Strand in that sentence with any other competing companies and you'll find it's a common practice when procurement practices are that open and non-restrictive.
In some regards, the sticker price of a
console is among the least important of factors in sizable projects.