Pretty onerous! All of those problems go away if you sell to a professional user / business instead of a regular consumer.
Surely that has to make a significant difference to the price that you charge in each case?
And that is where the whole core of this discussions stands - how much price overhead an A-brand can carry to have a financial net positive while honoring warranties and service agreements for a market segment that expects the lowest retail price? Sure, in a specialized forum such as this one, there will be many voices that are willing to value quality and services from top tier brands, but I am pretty sure it is a drop in the ocean when compared to the bulk of the market.
Specifically for Keysight, I see two things that might be going on:
- Since the first inception of the incredibly bold Keysight month marketing campaign, I always had this question in my mind: how many years were given for this division to invest in the broad mass market? Where is the ROI, given the B-brands are quickly catching up in broad reach (through e-commerce), quality and features at a lower cost? Will longer warranties, service contracts and spare parts availability be enough argument to attract customers to buy their products? After a few years into this, I suspect that someone recalculated the ROI and decided to de-emphasize direct sales as the marketing campaign alone did not return a net positive.
- With the introduction of the entry-level product line, myself (and many others around here) also asked how successful will this be in face of the quite popular low cost brands. The DSO1000X series uses the praised Keysight ASIC that differentiated their other product lines for many years, thus at first glance would be a slam dunk of usability when compared to others - however, whenever someone from the mass market asks on a forum like this for an opinion, rarely sees their products suggested due to a perceived low "bang-per-buck" ratio. Sure, the other brands have other features deemed more useful (and quite a few of them are), therefore I can't help but think that Keysight realized this might have been a miscalculation on their part - at least for the mass market (education might still be fine).
You can bet they are yearly calculating their ROI on both fronts and the shifts this year might be a reflection of a negative ROI - or a change in management, which would just change the threshold for providing investments on this front. A change to the rep/disty business model will carry forward higher costs to the end user, thus potentially killing this product line altogether.
Not working there I can only speculate but, based on my experience, that is not something that would surprise me.