by Eric & Richard
A matter of 15 years ago, some of us at Kitmondo who were then involved in the sale of used computer equipment, had a bright idea. As with all good ideas this sprang directly from a perceived need in a marketplace we were familiar with.
Although there was an active used computer market, there seemed to us to be a lack of knowledge as to what the uniform value of the equipment being traded really was. For much of the time dealers, auctioneers and brokers in the used game literally traded on their intuition. One of the main sources of used equipment, leasing companies who were re-assuming ownership at the end of a lease or at default, were particularly exposed, as generally speaking they didn’t have a clue. Worryingly for them, this lack of residual knowledge often impacted on their ability to write good business in the first place, which in turn led to some spectacularly ugly insolvencies during the 90’s.
Thus was born a quarterly review of used computer equipment which we published and which ran a little along the lines of the guides to used car prices. The publication was sold on an annual subscription basis and covered everything from a Compaq luggable to an IBM 3090. The basic information collated and laid out showed a full description, year of manufacture, original price and, in our opinion, what it might be worth on the used market at date of publication. It was probably very primitive at the time and what was even more primitive was the work involved in publishing it. None of us involved realised how much time it was going to take up. We had formed what the modern day poll analysts would call focus groups in each category of equipment and we polled them by telephone to try to determine what prices things would be fetching at the time we were due to publish the next edition. Every piece of equipment in quite a thick little publication had to be edited on a word processor before being sent to one of the only people in London who knew how to use PageMaker.
This was our first step into the classified business 15 years ago. When we compare it to the scope of the opportunity we are building here at Kitmondo, we wonder how on earth we did what we did all those years ago, before the wheel was invented.
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