How do you stop a war? With difficulty. Usually, the easiest way is to prevent it happening in the first place. Hewlett Packard has been trying to stop the channel battles which have dogged its printer products for years and are now spreading to its PC business. HP has fought a guerrilla war against its distributors to try to stop them selling products as loss leaders.

But the vendor will fail in its attempt to use the law because it has not clearly thought out what the channel response will be. The simple rules of business survival will defeat it. Loss-leading is nothing new and may even mark a new stage in the maturing of the IT industry. As items like PCs and printers move more rapidly into the realm of commodities, prices reflect their status and the market moves to treat them accordingly. Commodities become star players in the wars between distributors.

The problem resellers have is that one printer more or less resembles another, and as the differences blur, the choice for the buyer becomes difficult. One way of shifting vegetables is to give them away. At least you hook customers who might just buy some potatoes as well as expensive asparagus. And if a distributor can add some value, they may just come back for something else.

There is an old Russian proverb which says: ?Where there is a queue, there is a policeman.? HP has introduced a policeman into this particular channel equation with, it seems, much legal preparation but little thought about the political effects. How does this particular policeman use his clout? How do you find out and then prove that a distributor is selling below cost? Do you then use the courts? How often is HP prepared to take legal action?

There is no doubt that many dealers regard many distributors as mere box-shifters that add little value. And distributors still need to hit the volume targets set by HP. So how will they do it?

They will do what any market trader would do. They will provide a welter of additional special offers to sweeten the higher prices. But the channel is more sophisticated and the sleight of hand will be swifter and better hidden. But HP is still bogged down in a long guerrilla war, and if it thinks there is an end in sight soon it is mistaken. By the end of the year, the war will still not have ended ? it will simply have moved on to other products.