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Australian Govt Forces Apple, Adobe, Microsoft To Explain Price Hikes

Posted by timothy on from the what-the-market-will-bear dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Live outside the U.S.? Tired of paying huge local price markups on technology products from vendors such as Apple, Microsoft and Adobe? Well, rest easy, the Australian Government is on the case. After months of stonewalling from the vendors, today the Australian Parliament issued subpoenas compelling the three vendors to appear in public and take questions regarding their price hikes on technology products sold in Australia. Finally, we may have some answers for why Adobe, for example, charges up to $1,400 more for the full version of Creative Suite 6 when sold outside the U.S."

4 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. No, we're not price gouging by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Interestingly, one Australian company made the submission that it was cheaper to send an employee business class from Australia to the US to buy a certain piece of software there, stay for a night or two in a hotel, fly back, and pay import and/or GST at customs than it was to get the software locally.

    1. Re:No, we're not price gouging by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Don't worry, that won't be the case for long, (and not in a good way) companies would love to make buying something outside your local authorized dealer illegal.

      It may not be illegal yet, but Adobe has already moved in that direction.

      Adobe closed off their international sales for several weeks while they reviewed their international pricing, right as we needed to bring on more people for a new project. After a few weeks of being told we'd be able to buy more licenses any day now, we sent someone to the US to buy a couple of retail copies so we could at least have new people doing more than just surfing the net. Within 24 hours of installing the US boxed copies we had Adobe on the phone demanding to know why our company was running pirated copies of their software, and threatening to revoke *all* of our licenses if we didn't remove them immediately. Turns out they consider running a US boxed copy in a foreign country as a breach of contract and will cut you off. Eventually they had to admit that we had been trying, continuously, to buy a copy from them, and agreed to let us continue until their online store reopened so we could replace the copies we were running.

  2. Re:bad idea ? by arth1 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    difference in pricing models like this encourages piracy.

    True, and then companies will hike the prices up in the regions with high piracy rates to "compensate", which makes the piracy problem even worse, and you have an ever-escalating cycle.

    But the problem here is price fixing, using protectionist legislation as the method of artificially controlling the prices of products that have a near-monopoly in the market.
    The only real solution to this is to disallow region based controls, and turn the laws around so that it becomes illegal to restrict users based on geography.
    A free market is anti-competitive unless it's free for the buyer as well as the seller.

  3. Re:Valve / Steam... by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While I have no love for those companies, I wonder if the answer to your questions isn't going to be obvious (and annoying). It's "known" here in the US, that Europeans are willing to pay more for the same goods, and thus we charge them more for the same goods. Americans are known for choosing to buy cheap crap that will break in a week because it's cheaper, therefore more reliable vendors have to go lower to make the sale. Going to the farthest extreme, the Chinese are known for stealing software, movies, etc. and thus to make a sale there the price has to be very low.

    They call this "market based pricing", and I agree that it is actually quite a destructive practice, but I don't think it's illegal.