Intel, HP face boycott in south India

MAJOR SOUTHERN Indian capital Chennai - formerly known as Madras to the English - had a wake up call last Friday when two big multinationals decided to pay a flying visit to resellers, Channel Times of India reports.

But the flying squad's visit to resellers in Chennai may have backfired, as dealers in south India are up in arms, and both HP and Intel face a nationwide boycott, the paper reports today.

The boycott may spread to the whole of the country outside of southern India, it seems.

India has a thriving dealer channel but HP and Intel may well have rocked the boat with a visit intended to unearth "fake" products, says Channel Times.

Because the products seized by the Big Two were not fake at all, but genuine boxed and packaged goods, it has emerged. They could be so-called "grey market" products.

On Saturday, the entire IT industry in Chennai shut up their shops and refused to trade, putting Intel and HP's trade in jeopardy. And hopefully putting the wind up the big bullies.

South India has now decided to place an indefinite boycott on all HP and Intel products, after the reputation of the channel was besmirched.

Which must be fantastic news for Dell, AMD, Via and other vendors which have a better idea of how things work in India.

Chennai is not Cupertino or Satan Clara, after all, and has an ancient heritage. Only 55 million people live in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, which is credited with having one of the oldest written languages on the planet. We think HP and Intel have screwed up here, bigtime.

Last week, the same channel newspaper reported that Microsoft would not lower prices of its software in the country.

You can find the story here. No one from Intel in England was available for comment at press time. Situation in Swindon normal, then. (Note to any INTC thought police reading. This is a joke. We don't expect people in the UK to be working at this time of the morning. They're a good lot at Swindon and always pick up the phone, except not before the birds start tweeting, OK?) µ

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