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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.
All Microsoft licensing on all products! Oh wait, is this not the submission form? Whatever, I'm in America anyway, lol.
Of course that's explains it all. It's the _very_expensive_ freight involved in the shipment of CDs. I knew there had to be an answer.
Not all conservatives are stupid,
but it is true that most stupid people are conservative.
- Hume
What about internet supplied products such as music downloads. There is no reason at all us Australians should pay $1.69 when he same track is $0.99 in the US. Remoteness is not a factor. It is select companies deliberately price gouging us because they feel the market will bear it. I for one look forward to law changes to correct this problem.
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
shit doesn't just teleport there by magic
There's this thing, it's called the internet. It teleports stuff there by magic. At least a part of this investigation is into price discrimination on software.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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
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!
No, it gets here by mail order.
For some reason it is way, way cheaper for me to order stuff from the far east, the US or even the UK and have it shipped over, than it is to get it from an australian website or retailer. Don't tell me that bulk shipping adds a 100% plus markup over individual shipping, these things work the other way around.
And then there are other things like games, which you get online, which often launch at $50-60 in the US and AUD 100 ($102 right now) here. For the same thing, delivered over the internet.
There is no justification.
And then there are other things like games, which you get online, which often launch at $50-60 in the US and AUD 100 ($102 right now) here. For the same thing, delivered over the internet.
But those poor poor distributors have to pay for the game to be shipped to you over your narrow and long tubes. Oh wait, you pay for that part too via your network subscription...
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
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?
The price difference is well above the cost+profit margin of transportation.
Why is it there are so many Americans who comment on stuff about other countries who automagically assume things that they have zero clue about.
That's true - shipping costs theoretically should make prices different, on a dollars per kilo basis. For durable goods, there are many many cases where buying the item at retail in the US and shipping into Australia yourself will end up being far far cheaper than buying the item in Australia.
One of the examples is a Lenovo X1 laptop. I just checked, and the same laptop is AUD1299 vs USD1019. As of this moment, AUD1299 is USD1265. That means Australians are paying 24% more (about $250) for the same product. Now, I know you can Fedex a laptop from the US to Australia for under $100, and if you are Lenovo, you can handle the shipping for a lot less.
But consider that its not a matter of shipping from the US, but rather comparing shipping from China to the US vs from China to Australia. In this case, the shipping costs are basically the same. Australia is no more 'isolated' from China than the US is.
Basically, Australians are being raped.
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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.
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
But Australia is closer to China (where everything gets made) ... so why are Australians paying more than Americans?
And the boats that ship all our minerals to China can just fill up on stuff on the way back, so shipping should basically be free...
Business/App ideas are like arseholes: everyone's got one, they're mostly shit, but very rarely they contain a diamond
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.
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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