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HP Seeks to Block Competitor From Revealing Its Pricing
Matt Asay writes "On October 13, 2008, Hewlett-Packard sent a complaint to an open-source competitor, GroundWork, asking GroundWork to stop revealing HP's 'confidential' pricing. CNET has posted the letter, which indicates that HP doesn't want its pricing revealed, but which doesn't question the veracity of the pricing (which, not surprisingly, is 82 percent higher than the open-source vendor's). Does HP think its pricing is really a secret? It's publicly available at GSA Advantage. Guess what? HP software costs a lot of money, but presumably feels that it can justify the high prices. Why try to hide the pricing information?"
It's corporate BS like this that makes life suck for everyone else. Competitive pricing is one thing businesses try to hide as much as possible so that they can backstab others. I'm glad it's being publicized, and I hope it gets HP to lower their list price so they won't be able to fuck over so many consumers and will have to start actually competing fairly. How could you stand up for fuck-you-over corporate tactics when this information should be free and they shouldn't be able to do that?
Which is off course much worse than selling software other people wrote for free and competing with companies that pay their programmers.
/. is the unbeatable major-league BS champ when it comes to open-source marketing.
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Sorry but I prefer honesty.
No, you don't. You do not want to know how cheaply some other gets the same service, it would make you feel bad.
You want to feel good.
Don't deceive yourself thinking that everyone should get the same price.