Well, your misinterpretation of my remark is, I guess, understandable. as I was referring to the lack of competition between manufacturers, owing to the fact they make different products, rather than producing similar ones and competing in price, quality, timely delivery, etc. Instead, they produce "similar" products that are not identical, hence avoid competition. Distributors, then, act as agents for different manufacturers, thereby avoiding the need for competition as well.

Mouser and DigiKey don't play those games. They simply try to provide what the customer wants, charge a little more, but provide vastly better service than, say, Newark, or whoever. I've never had a shipment from either Mouser or DigiKey arrive a day after it was promised, which was, therefore, a day late, and sent by overnight with Saturday morning delivery, costing an order of magnitude more than it would have if it had been shipped when promised. Aside from the distributors, and, BTW, this was decades ago, when they were local and had local stock, which I could pick up on will-call rather than relying on their shipping droids, they've all done that late-ship-with-premium-shipping thing of late. That's why I use the ones I can rely on.

We have Avnet and Arrow in Denver, and I only buy what I can pick up at their will-call counter. There'll be no more of this drop-ship to me at 20x the cost of the product.

The point I was making with the "no competition" remark was that, because their parts are different, NXP and Atmel don't compete with one another, so, neither do their distributors, at least in that market.

RE