>am I the only one immune to the this sort of thing?

Thing is, techniques that work great on one type of person will repulse another, so it's perfectly normal for a nerd to be completely immune to a sales pitch targeted at a neurotypical. But that doesn't mean you can't be manipulated; it just requires different techniques. To believe otherwise is dangerous overconfidence.

>I'm actually kind of confused why this warrants a post-mortem given that I would hope that no one ever duplicates this sort of tactic in a legitimate business. Let the product sell itself, don't "become the customer's friend" in order to push it on them.

All co-location is sold this way. As are commercial real-estate leases... and most residential leases, for that matter. All of us, if we go into business, will have to buy products or services sold by those sorts of salesmen. Knowing a bit about how their manipulation works is the first step towards self-defense.

I mean, it's not usually unsolicited... but if you want to lease some co-lo? almost nobody except maybe some of the tiny nobodies list prices on the web page... and 90% of the time, those prices are not solid; they are significantly higher than the 'special for you' price.

If you want to lease bandwidth? same thing applies, only the difference between the first price you get and the 'special because you are my friend' price is larger. I'm paying 1/5 the 'list price' for my large Cogent pipe.

So... it should be obvious why you need to study this stuff. Well, obvious why I need to study this stuff; I blow through north of a hundred grand on co-lo, bandwidth, and other related fees every year; I'd bet money that I'm not within 20% of the lowest possible price, so yeah, it's worth quite a bit of effort to figure out how this bullshit works.

All that said, it is bullshit. I avoid it whenever possible. I build my own servers from parts, because you don't have to negotiate to get reasonable prices on parts, but you do have to negotiate to get reasonable prices on assembled servers. The negotiation effort is far greater than the assembly effort.

Really, I think this is one of the primary reasons "the cloud" seems so much easier to deal with than co-location. No negotiation, no dealing with the co-lo jacking up your rent every year. (Yeah, just like a commercial or residential real-estate lease, every time your lease is up, the rent goes up in proportion to how difficult the landlord thinks it is for you to move.)

I've tried putting 'real prices' on my website for things like bandwidth and co-lo (the bandwidth prices were really good, for the amounts I was offering. The co-lo prices were reasonable but not unheard of.) Almost no bites. I did get salesmen calling me up all over the place; for a 10% cut, they'd send me all kinds of customers.

So yeah... as far as I can tell? this is just how some goods and services are sold. As far as I can tell, the optimal move is usually to rearrange your life and your business so you buy as few of the products that require negotiation as possible; But eh, depending on your sector, well, this may be impossible. In that case? yeah, learning sales bullshit and negotiation is important, if nothing else, to defend yourself against others.

I mean, I've negotiated a fair number of co-lo deals. Probably more than your average person negotiates residential leases during their lifetime. But the person at the other side of the table? they are a professional. They do this all day, every day.

So yeah. Even now? I do sometimes come away finding that the professional has manipulated me into doing something stupid. For me? key is to not agree to anything in person; take it home, show it to a (more conservative... my problem is that I optimistically buy more for a lower unit cost and end up not using most of it.) friend, sleep on it, and then decide. I mean, I am in business and my conservative friends are not, I can't completely defer to them, but getting a perspective that is different from your own is super important, because sales manipulations that work on one type of person don't work on another.