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Adobe Bows To Pressure and Cuts Australian Prices
An anonymous reader writes "Software giant Adobe has bowed to public pressure and slashed the price of some of its products for Australian customers a day after being ordered to front a parliamentary committee hearing to explain its excessive charges."
Because they thought they could get away with it. For a long time they were right.
That definitely makes them look not guilty.
Umm, no... That's not what this is about.
.au. Apple does it with iTunes, Steam does it with games. Adobe does it with whatever crap they're flogging these days and so do most of the rest. Hardware as well. When I hear Americans talk about $500 computers at "Best Buy" or whatever, I feel sick. The kind of people who buy computers at Best Buy in the US are the kind of people who pay $2,000 for the same thing, in Harvey Norman, here - and our dollar is worth more than the USD, so it's not exchange rates.
This isn't a taxation issue - it's an extortion issue. This is pure and simple that (predominantly) American companies double, triple and sometimes a lot more than that the price of digital downloads when destination ==
Considering they're all assembled in China, which is closer to Australia, I don't buy that's it's a freight cost, either. It's long been known that IT companies just jack up the price massively if they're dealing with Australia because we've allowed ourselves to become accustomed to it.
Yeah, that's another thing that I noticed when I came to the US: people have an enormous amount of stuff in their enormous (by UK standards) houses. Even after 22 years in the US, I still can't get over how much stuff is available, and how little it costs. Don't get me wrong: I like stuff. But it's overwhelming how much stuff there is.
You highlight a real US problem, though: people not understanding the time value of money. It's not taught in the schools, AFAIK. This leads to living on credit (which is astonishingly expensive, if, like most people, you use credit cards) and living for "now" versus "the rest of your life". Try explaining to the average person that waiting a few months to save for something saves you 10-80% of the long-term cost (depending on how indebted you are). The classic symptom of this: a car dealer asking you what monthly payment you're looking for when you walk onto the lot. And there are insidious money-sucking prices in the US, too: what the average home spends on healthcare, mobile voice/data and cable/satellite is just incredible. And every marketing genius has figured out the recurring revenue model and many households fall for it, e.g. Sirius/XM for your car(s).