Some little tech products company decided to sell my employer the newest high tech data storage hardware. In those days the one big name in computers was International Business Machines and our computer system was leased from IBM including the magnetic tape drive we used for daily backups. IBM had retailer program through which little tech could sell IBM branded products under the aura of being a Value Added Retailer. And so the little tech salesman arrived at our office along with the IBM salesman to pitch IBM's newest technology: optical storage.
This story is from so long ago that optical storage was pretty new. It was not available for home theater purposes yet. It was not particularly dense, meaning the disks were rather large and the number of bits recorded was rather small. The price? I do not remember the pricing but I am confident it was still offered with the added New Tech Premium.
From a data processing point of view the optical storage platter shared the advantage with existing magnetic tape reels of being removable -- once the copy was made you could take the physical media and put it in the safe. On the other hand as a disk it shared the potential advantage of direct access -- if you were searching for some one particular record you could find it by index and not have to read all the accounts from the beginning until you found it. Of course the advantage of direct access is only theoretical unless you have actually lost data and need to restore it from the backup copy; I do not recall when we ever needed to do that.
We reserved a room and in front of the big tech salesman the little tech salesman made his pitch to our department manager, me, and some number of others. As I recall the pitch was all about how new and wonderful optical storage was. I (who arrived in this position from a teaching job in which a high school student presented the wonders of optical disk to the class) was not deeply impressed. I also thought there was something missing.
"What I want to know is what Value do you Add," I said to the little tech salesman.
His reply was some variation on "Huh?"
I said, "Well, you are a Value Added Retailer, right? If we decide to buy optical disk equipment we can order it directly from IBM. The IBM salesman is sitting right there. Or we could buy it from you. We might buy it from you if you add some value. So I am asking what value you would add."
He had no answer.
My manager was displeased with my asking. We never did buy optical disk storage. My question was never answered. Just today it floated back into my consciousness still open for a response.
In the actual reality game a player often has the opportunity to buy, accept, or otherwise obtain materials, ideas, or relationships of possible value. It seems to me there are exactly 2 questions about any such potential acquisition:
(1) Why would we want to acquire this?
(2) And if we did, why would we want to acquire it from you?
In my anecdote the little tech salesman had part of an answer to the first question and no answer at all to the second. Whatever game he was playing, he was not playing with actual reality.