Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Raises UK Cloud, Software Prices 22% After Brexit-Fuelled Pound Drop (techweekeurope.co.uk)
Reader Mickeycaskill writes: Microsoft is to substantially increase its prices for software and cloud services prices offered in British pounds in order to accommodate the sharp drop in the currency against the US dollar in recent weeks. Beginning in January 2017 on-premises enterprise software prices will go up by 13 percent and most enterprise cloud prices will increase by 22 percent, bringing them into line with euro prices. Microsoft said it isn't planning to change its prices for consumer software and cloud services. The value of the pound has fallen by about 18 percent since the EU referendum on 23 June.
Apparently these things happen even with much larger volume fiat currencies as well.
You stupid USians don't know what's going to hit you when Microsoft finds out that you illegally broke away from the EU 240 years ago!
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
What exactly does "sovereignty" mean here? Britain is literally sending out feelers all over the world looking for trade deals that will, now wait for it, limit its sovereignty. That is the nature of treaties.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The word "sovereignty" is like "freedom". People throw around those words as if they can do anything they want. Reality says you still have to work with your peers, it's just up to you to judge the best way to do it (and to accept the consequences when things start to suck).
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
All they're doing is following the exchange rate for the British pound.
Except Brussels itself is a construct of all the EU members, and it is the pooled sovereignty of all EU members that counts. This claim that Brussels is some sort of overlord that controls Europe demonstrates a great ignorance of what the EU is.
Beyond that, all but the most hardened Brexiteers would love to stay in the Common Market, which was why they kept talking about how Britain could still remain part of the ECC.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The point is that Britain is agreeing to those trade deals. The treaties are not agreed upon by the EU and forced onto Britain. Being able to negotiate your own treaties is part of being sovereign.
How many terror attacks can you link to freedom of movement? And the Greeks want to stay in the Eurozone (which is different than the EU) and it is pretty clear Germany wants Greece to remain as well.
And if the Brits had enough of it, how come so many Brexiteers were hanging on to the hope of remaining in the ECC (which, by the way, would still mean some degree of freedom of movement).
Frankly, I think Brexit was just an episode of national pique, and I suspect if you reran the referendum now, with at least some of the ramifications becoming clear (such as Norway objecting to continued British membership in the ECC), Remain would have a solid win.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Every time a brexiter in denial with "oh they're just using brexit as an excuse".
No, you dumb bastard - if the GBP is worth 20% less then business either have to absorb a ~20% loss or increase prices. There's no conspiracy here. There's no clever accounting being hidden you by MAINSTREAM MEDIA LIES to make it look like the GBP has not seriously lost value when actually it hasn't. The fact is that the currency is no so useful atm. Just as investment in the UK in general is now not so attractive, not least because of a huge amount of uncertainty that investors hate - all that's really worth doing is buying chunks of UK business on the cheap, like our loss of our best technology asset, ARM.
It might be worth doing in the consumer sector because 1) they're facing serious competition atm 2) it's a smaller market anyway. But other business can't do this. They either run on much smaller margins, or they don't have huge reserves to release the pain more slowly. Sure, Carney has been making excellent use of public money to buffer things for now - his was the "emergency budget" that took place entirely within the executive sphere - but eventually he is going to run out of other people's money, to quote the old bat, and QE would just devalue the pound further.
I run a small business, but I'm already way worse off because everything I import costs a fuck-ton more and I can't afford to just bump prices up accordingly when my larger competitors already have huge warehouses of stock and have the power of scale to have negotiated pricing agreements. All the OMG RED TAPE that supposedly comes from Brussels is a myth, and what few anti-small-business legislation exists is hardly likely to be removed by the prevent government, whose ear is deaf to all but the largest enterprises.
Brexit is mostly a democratic expression of xenophobia that, because of no minimum turnout requirements, means the majority has to suffer heavily thanks to a third of the country being thick.
Mind you, I could be way worse off. Those northern working class voters who thought this would be to their advantage are going to be in for a hell of a ride.
As demonstrated with the Canadian trade deal, they have to be unanimous, so a trade deal at the EU level could only be 'forced' onto the UK if the UK had already agreed to it.
The EU was fine as the EEC - European Economic Community. It got ruined when Chancellor Kohl and President Mitterand tried to perfect what was already good enough, and make it into a more political union. The Eurozone sounded like a great idea, except that the Deutschmark was no way the same as the Drachma or the Lira. End result is a currency that is dominated by one member, and that member taking the economic hits of all the populist moves of countries like Greece and Portugal
Demonstrably bullshit, and exactly the kind of falsehood that the Leave campaign was spouting during the UK's referendum - at least in the way that you are positing. Check out the latest news on the ongoing negotiations over the EU-Canada trade deal that is currently on the rocks because *three* regions of one EU member state (Belgium) are objecting to the deal. Everyone else - all the other 27 members of the EU and Canada want to go ahead, but can't because of those three provinces, and the terms of the deal (5MB PDF) are entirely public knowledge - unlike things like TPP and TTIP where the US is involved and insists on secrecy.
The real irony of the situation (and the reason for my caveat); the three regions that are blocking the deal are Wallonia, the French speaking region of Flanders... and Brussels itself (albeit as a province of Belgium rather than as the EU).
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Okay, your imports cost more, so you should buy British stuff to have it cost the same. As an added bonus, your product will be cheaper than imports, making you more competitive......
I don't know, calling this "brexit" when it's not even happening is ridiculous. The are a couple of issues here. One, the pound has been overvalued for quite a while now, the uncertainty brought about recently has only sought to restore the pound to a more accurate valuation (although some economists feel that the valuation is higher than it should be still).
Unfortunately, the issue with uncertainty isn't brexit, but the result of politicians that aren't actually acting. The government is not doing a good job at showing certainty, article 50 hasn't even been executed by our government, so we and everyone else don't even know if we're even really leaving the EU or not. Brexit is simply leaving the EU and there is no progress since the elections, we're just stuck in limbo while politicians do anything but act. At this point, our politicians need to either start acting and declare we're staying in the EU or leaving, otherwise we're just going to ruin ourselves by staying in this stupid limbo.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I must add that this is an excellent point. Despite higher costs for imported raw materials, the drop in Sterling is working wonders for the UK manufacturing sector. Politicians on the left and right have argued and clamoured for a "rebalancing of the economy", i.e. boosting manufacturing; now they have it. Don't believe me? Read the UK's latest PMI report (https://www.markiteconomics.com/Survey/PressRelease.mvc/f55855e5e87b4e9dadc0e3cbea1c285f). To quote: "The weak sterling exchange rate remained the prime growth engine, driving higher new orders from Asia, Europe, the USA and a number of emerging markets."
Besides, those of us who read the financial press (as I do) will be well aware the central banks have long complained of needing a currency devaluation and a bit more inflation to help western economies. Britain has, quite inadvertently, achieved precisely this.
Rule Britannia? :-)
Have you forgotten the IMF ballout, the Winter of Discontent and later Maggie going begging for a rebate because Britain was the "sick man of Europe"? We were shagged before we joined the EEC, and I hope leaving it's successor doesn't take us back to those dark days.
Talking of this recent event bringing back manufacturing jobs is bullshit that some politicians -- especially on the left -- like to peddle, but in fact if manufacturing comes back it will more likely be automated. Anyway, this depreciation doesnt allow us to compete with China's labour costs, or any of its competitors now that it is getting too expensive. When the pound dropped after the 2008 financial crises, the relative side of our trade gap didn't shrink... it's not price that's preventing people buying our products.
If half the international banking industry leaves then we'll end up with a gap in governement finances that will cause them to make cuts more painful than anything George Osbourne did in the last six years, I can guarantee that a boom in exports won't cover this difference. And as the economy contracts the size of the interest payments on the goverment's debts will become the fifth biggest expense... finance industry wins again.
We don't really have much choice. We are going to have to do deals with bigger countries and groups like the US and EU, or face economic ruin. If they say jump, we can only ask how high or fall back to WTO rules and suffer the economic consequences.
Gibraltar is also likely to lose its sovereignty and become jointly run by Spain. There is no other way, short of independence perhaps as part of Scotland (!), that they can save their economy which is entirely reliant on there being an open border. Spain can simply refuse to agree to any kind of UK-EU trade deal unless they get Gibraltar, and the UK government will throw them under the bus.
Leaving the EU has massively reduced our bargaining power and attractiveness. Watch as companies pull out, starting with Nissan next month. In practical terms we have much less power than we did previously, and what we gained is mostly useless because e.g. what kind of a choice is kicking our Johnny Foreigner vs. economic ruin?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC