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Windows in Brazil Costs 20% of Per Capita Business Income
mjasay writes "Ever wonder why open source is so popular in Brazil and other BRIC nations? As one study suggests, one big reason may well be Microsoft's punitive pricing, which exceeds 20 percent of Gross National Income for businesses in Brazil (and 7.8 percent of consumer GNI). This leads to a second, related reason: At those prices, there's little hope that Brazil can build a home-grown software economy on the foundation of proprietary software. This factor is exacerbated by Brazil's widespread disdain for the United States, which also tends to favor software that is not perceived as American. Of late the free and open-source Brazilian dream may be fading a little but its importance to the long-term growth prospects of the Brazilian economy shouldn't be understated."
Duarte's blog post is interesting and cites some statistics, but calling it a "study" is a bit rich.
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The Brazilian gov't puts heavy taxes on any technologies that are imported. Their whole idea is to be so punative that companies that manufacture in Brazil won't have to compete vs. the outside world. The Wii costs over $1000 in Brazil and the Playstation 3 costs $1800. (These are 2007 prices, I'm not sure what's current) The games cost $300-$400 reais, which is probably about $200 US Dollars. It's not just a Microsoft issue.
Think about it, would you pay 2500 to 5000 bucks for your OS?, or would you want something in the realm of what you can pay for it, Open source is becoming an avalanche in poor countries just because its free, and its current ( up to date), 3.1416racy is rampant in poor countries because people can pay 5 to 15 bucks for the latest M$xp, and they can pay 3 bucks for a 3.1416rated game,but they can not pay the salary of a whole year for brutally expensive software according to their economy, when somebody can get an OS that does what they need, for free ( Open source/Linux), they spread the word AND the CD to all their social group, creating a geometrical distribution into their circles of buddies, I have several friends in South America, and none of them have an original disk of anything, they used the underground market to get what they needed, for the price they were able to pay. The day that M$/proprietary software matches the price of their products to the economic environment in which they want to sell ( Marking it geographically) they will get a hold of the market, in the mean time, people will want the lowest cost for the maximum benefit.
From the article: "I imagine Microsoft charges about the same and Brazilâ(TM)s brutal tax burden makes up the rest." The summary was pretty confusingly written, but the article actually covered that.