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Australian Govt Forces Apple, Adobe, Microsoft To Explain Price Hikes
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."
Printing the instructions upside down costs money silly.
I already know the answer. It's the same reason Canadians pay far more for the same items in the US even though our dollar has been at parity for years now.
There was one scandal where Bombardier, a Canadian company receiving government money, was charging Canadians more for ATVs made in Canada than they charged in the US. So effectively the Canadian government was subsidizing a company to rip-off it's own citizens.
"Why? Because fuck you. That's why."
When you print money to pay off debts the currency devalues and it is a no brainer. THe exchange rates are going downhill as the house wants to debate whether to default or not eveyr 3 months.
Therefore, the Bank of Australia wants a higher percentage to avoid the risk as the dollar is the worlds worst currency right now with the highest risk. ... Well Japan might be tieing the US in this area if the government improves more printing of money.
So MS responds with the 30% premium to convert dollars to Australias currency by passing it on to the consumer.
IT also explains why healthcare costs are skyrocketing up with insurnace, food, housing and student loans while incomes decline. All this free money given to rich by low interest rates inflates the money supply.
Holy shit. It's a real life application of the Chewbacca Defense. This is amazing... :)
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.
Actually, Valve is mentioned in the article as one that people wanted investigated - but not as one that required a subpoena to provide information. This suggests that Valve voluntarily told them how their pricing works.
Which, as far as I know, is "We set what price the producer wants us to, or they refuse to sell on Steam at all."
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.
Let me have a go:
Monkey == Human
Robot == Overlord
Zombie == Politician
What do I win?
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.
And yet if I was to go overseas and buy as many copies of Photoshop as I can fit in my bag, jet back to Oz and resell them it is illegal.
Unicode in Slashdot
You seem to be under the misguided belief that costs determine prices. In the real world, that's only rarely true,
Microsoft, Adobe, etc are not charities like the Raspberry Pi foundation; they adjust their prices in order to maximize their profits.
In an ideal scenario, competition would lower the prices. There are many reasons why this doesn't happen in this market, but you can thank government-granted monopolies like patents for a big chunk of that - it's kinda hard to compete when you can't even implement FAT on your OS without paying Microsoft.
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