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Australian IT Price Hike Inquiry Kicks Off: Submissions Wanted
New submitter wirelessduck writes "After some recent complaints from a Labor MP about price markups on software and technology devices in Australia, Federal Government agencies decided to look in to the matter and an official parliamentary inquiry into the issue was started. 'The Federal Parliament's inquiry into local price markups on technology goods and services has gotten under way, with the committee overseeing the initiative issuing its terms of reference and calling for submissions from the general public on the issue.'"
Because Kangaroos are pretty awesome(basically velociraptor sheep) I offer the following advice:
Y'know why vendors price their goods absurdly high in Australia? Because they can.
Y'know why they can? Because You, the government of Australia, let them.
Allow free importation of goods from the US and other markets and watch the vendor premiums for your mysterious island continent collapse. If Australians could simply buy from Adobe US, It'd be pretty difficult for Adobe to maintain a price premium...
Here endeth the lesson.
Is as useful as tits on a bull. Companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software. Who is anybody to tell them different?
Complaining about the lack of funding into open source or at least home-grown software is much more useful.
You do live in a very remote country with vast distances between major points, shit doesn't just teleport there by magic.
All Microsoft licensing on all products! Oh wait, is this not the submission form? Whatever, I'm in America anyway, lol.
It's not so much about high prices - it's about price discrimination. Yes, companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software. And if they sell it for half the price in the US as compared to Australia, then customer's can damn well buy it wherever they want. And if companies introduce artificial barriers to stop the customers doing just that, that's when the government needs to smack them down.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Is as useful as tits on a bull.
No It's not
Companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software.
Sure, but they shouldn't be allowed to stop you importing it from another region.
Who is anybody to tell them different?
The Australian Government
Well its a bit unfair when the same game that cost $10 USD is somehow marked up to $70 AUD.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
for me (the multinational) and not for thee (the pathetic consumer).
Certain parties are far too used to having their cake and eating cake too: yours.
Companies can charge whatever they damn well want for their software.
And people can criticize their decisions. But if people are indeed buying it anyway, I'd agree it's not useful.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Posting AC because of Slashdot's bug that prevents me from logging in.
A Technet subscription is mysteriously $200 more dear a year in Australia despite us being quite happy to use US English and keyboards. Yet in Thailand, it's $40 a year, where they need a full translation and separate keyboard support. What's the difference?
The Thai pirate software a lot. A *lot*.
So I ask you, what's the simplist way for Australians to reduce the price of Technet?
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Well, that customer testimonial has sold me! Unfortunately, I've already spent this month's IT budget on some Nigerian anti-virus software (they requested I pay for it in person, my flight leaves in an hour...busy busy), so I can't buy any.
However, a close friend of mine has confided in me that the company he works for is having some major, major security problems, and has given him a HUGE budget to buy whatever he needs to shore things up. His number is 202-324-3000, ask for "Bob" (his last name escapes me, I think it's Russian; lots of consonants, very few vowels).
P.S. Getting through the company phone system can be a bit of a pain (they have this automated system, and they are always changing their options...it can be quite trying). If you can't find him in the company phone book, just ask the operator to find his extension for you. Bear in mind, these people are all about security, so they may say things like "we do not have a Bob working for us" or "do you know who you are talking to?"; just relax, it's all a bluff. Bob's pretty far up there on the company hierarchy, and sometimes these annoying sales people dial the wrong number...just tell them that you "now exactly who you are talking to, and it's not Bob" (you need to be insistent at times with these people, so don't give up). There is, of course, a chance that Bob might be out of his office; if that's the case, ask them to put on their chief IT security guy (he handles purchase orders when Bob isn't around), and tell him everything you've told me here. Be sure to have him install a demo version of the software on his machine, and to walk him through the features; he'll be so impressed, he will probably ask for an on-site demonstration from you and your fellow coworkers. Also, remember to mention any other software your company makes, that he might be interested in.
I am John Hurt.
Japan has a similar problem. Adobe CS6 Master Suite costs 334900yen ($4,203.59 USD), but if you buy it direct from Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-CS6-Master-Collection-Download/dp/B007USFTJM/ref=sr_1_1_title_1?s=software&ie=UTF8&qid=1337964816&sr=1-1 it will cost you $2379 USD (189,613.80 JPY yen). That is about double the price!!! How can that be legal? For STEAM, the prices in Australia were 2/3rds what we were paying in Japan. It seems steam have recently changed that though and are bum fucking us too. I would love to hear an explanation for the change, especially considering the value of the yen at the moment.
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
Australia Post love shipping stuff everywhere. Our governments know we can't afford to let such core infrastructure die, regardless of the whim and desire of powerful, rich tyrants like and the rest of the retail industry incumbents. You wanted a free market, and the free market wants your stale business model to die quietly. And don't start crying about jobs, there'll be new industries creating new types of jobs in the wake of the people you constantly "down-size" to prop up your bottom line or improve the new manager's performance statistics.
Leela: "Is all the work done by children?" Alien: "No, not the whipping."
This harks back to a practice among IT companies some years back called (I think) 'transfer pricing'. By charging the local branch of the company a very high cost price, the item could still be sold at a high price with little markup to be taxed in the local jurisdiction.
the extra cost is localising the software from english to australian. for example:
[ Yes ] , [ No ] , [Cancel] => [ Rippa ] , [ Bugga ] , [ WTF mate? ]
i tell you now, it's hard to find someone fluent in australian. i mean try find someone that can tell you what a "drongo" is. ask five aussie's and they'll all tell you different things. they also like to "take the piss", which equates to bullshitting people, making it much more difficult to confirm whether something is correct or not. as a result there are many things still in dispute such as dropbear, platypus, hoop snake, and bunyip. the platypus is the most suspect of those of course. i mean really, what kind of evolutionary process results in a beaver that lays eggs, is duck-billed, otters footed, and is venomous. don't go looking up the wikipedia article on it either. with over 4000 revisions in the history log and a near daily edit rate, odds are it's a battle between editors cleaning up the article to state it's still speculative, and aussies attack it again to add it all back in as fact.
This mirrors what I've heard - that it is the number of middlemen involved in Australian imports that cause the price to be so high for a whole range of goods.
But that's for physical goods.
That doesn't apply for software that you download, unless folks like akamai, etc, are charging a premium also for delivering software to Australians?
Going by the very same logic, pirating their software is OK.
If they can discriminate on their pricing I can discriminate on my sourcing.
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
Bingo. It's a free market, down with regulations!!!!!! Gotta make sure all those job creators make increasing profits every quarter. Cut regulations, Cut Taxes. Nothing else matters.
The real evil in our representative democracies is regulatory capture. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
For instance software. Ubuntu, Apache, etc have shown that Copyright laws are not necessary in the development of good software. I suspect the same is true in music, movies, books and a lot of other stuff.
The copyright laws funnel money to organizations (MPAA, RIAA et al) that advertise the product and "capture" favorable regulations. (is copyright really necessary to produce good movies? Then why does'nt the success of a movie correlate strongly with its production cost? Most of the profit comes from showing the movie in theatres).
Fortunately for everybody (except those few who benefit from regulatory capture) the copyright regulations are failing. Hence (I suspect) the recent involvement of homeland security in closing pirate sites.
There are also things that are relatively inexpensive in AU, but when sold in the US go for a 3+x premium.
If the AU people in general didn't like it, they have the power to change their own government. Whenever
a government oppresses the governed more than the governed are willing to accept, change happens.
This has been shown over and over again. Sometimes it takes a considerable time, but it happens.
I can only assume that most AU citizens are tacitly happy, since they are not 'throwing the bumbs out'.
On occasion even a majority of citizens can be misled/taken down the garden path, and it can be very
hard to come out of a direction when taken. But it does happen.
I might suggest reading/watching the book/movie "The Fountain Head" by Ayn Rand which speaks of the rights of the individual over the collective.
If I try to buy windows server datacenter edition from the USA the price is around half of that in Australia, this is online buying, no shipping involved. We're not the only country though. Someone in the UK said it would be cheaper to buy an Adobe package by flying to the USA, purchase it and then fly back to the UK rather than buying it locally.
And any of that relates to digital on-line sales, how?
There are some costs in shipping shit to Australia, but if you're too stupid as Harvey Norman to arrange purchase direct from the supplier and ship it yourself I'm not sure how that's my problem; when I can purchase direct from a retailer and ship a single unit for less even though I can't take advantage of the price benefits of shipping in bulk.
The real issue in your mythical supply chain is two-fold:
- Australian retail wages are higher than in the US, by around 50% (This is your biggest cost)
- Australian real estate is at unsustainable levels which forces the rents high on the retail space you hold the rapidly diminishing levels of JIT stock, and increases the wage pressure above so people can afford to live within a commute of their horrible wage slave job.
Nothing is going to make hardware cost the same in Australia, and the government isn't sugesting that, but the electronic on-line sales price discrepancy is just pure market gouging.
That said, if you want Americans to lower prices in Australia, stop buying their shit in Australia.
This problem is not limited to software... Look up what prestige cars cost in Australia, vs what they cost in the US. Why do cars cost more here? The market can support it here, because there are enough idiots who don't question or aren't aware that they are paying so much more here than elsewhere.
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Australian banks will lend what you can afford to pay, if nothing in your life gets worse. I would contend that foreclosure rates aren't up because people were overcommitted on their reported income, they are up because people lost that income.
In any case, I agree the land prices are a bit high (if it was actually $25K and 20 years, then it should be closer to $116K at 8% a year which isn't uncommon in Australia's messed up housing market), but that's because if the government sells that land at $25K it devalues the value of YOUR house retrospectively and you would lynch them. The government controls the price of land by limiting supply, which means you get "growth" in assets which keeps the baby boomers happy which keeps the government in power.
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