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Ask Slashdot: Should Commercial Software Prices Be Pegged To a Country's GDP?
Here's a bright idea from dryriver
Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly? Most software makers in the U.S. and EU currently insist on charging the full U.S. or EU price in much poorer countries. "Rampant piracy" and "low sales" is often the result in these countries. Why not change this by charging lower software prices in less wealthy countries?
This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses -- but is there a way to make that pricing more fair? Leave your best suggestions in the comments. should commercial software prices be pegged to a country's GDP?
This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses -- but is there a way to make that pricing more fair? Leave your best suggestions in the comments. should commercial software prices be pegged to a country's GDP?
Because of the simple fact that doing this will move the problem. Instead of having piracy in those "poor" countries, you will now have resellers taking advantage of the low price and making a profit in the "rich" country.
Problem solved.
Why yes.... my multinational corporation will be happy to purchase 300000 user licenses from our 1 person office in your favorite poor country.
The reason folks from the US shop in Mexico for prescription drugs and animal vaccines is because this phenomenon already exists.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
See subject.
Back in the day, I could get grey market Novell packages for less than the local Netmare distributor's wholesale price.
The world is a global market. You can get a genuine Chinese Fluke DMM for the price of a cheapy. They are blowing their peckers off to serve a market that mostly ignores brands in any case.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Because if the full Autodesk suit was sold for $1 in the Central African Republic, then everyone would just buy from that distributor.
My Ethiopian office now handles Oracle licensing and leases database servers to us.
Windows pricing is very different in China, for example (rampant piracy).
It sounds more fair when you say charge less in poorer countries. However when you turn it around, it is gouge the people in less poor countries.
Kind of like when a tax preparer takes a percentage cut. Why should they get paid more from someone who is getting more back, for essentially the same work?
What's to stop people from going to Venezuela and buying 10 copies of Final Cut Pro and bringing it back to the US? Unless you are suggesting that they start region locking software, controlling which country you can use software in depending on where you bought it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What is wrong with you? Those who produce can ask what they like for what they produce. If it isn't worth it people won't buy. Whether it is worth it or not, there will always be those that will steal what is produced. 'Fair' is where you go to sell your pig, not the means by which you set the price.
If you allow lower prices for India and China, what's to stop companies from buying the software in those countries and use it in USA? These companies use all the tax loopholes to move their profits to overseas subsidiaries. They know their customers will create subsidiaries in India and turn around and buy services from the subsidiary and use it in USA. The snakes know the legs of snakes, as the old Tamil proverb goes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Arbitrage!
They should always use Open Source and just follow the GPL.... ;-)
Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly? Most software makers in the U.S. and EU currently insist on charging the full U.S. or EU price in much poorer countries. "Rampant piracy" and "low sales" is often the result in these countries. Why not change this by charging lower software prices in less wealthy countries?
Because if you want to make cheap goods and flood my market indiscriminately and then call me a protectionist and accuse me of impeding free trade for creating a level playing field, then I should be allowed to freely (as in, I am free to do as I please) sell my software at whatever price I like in your country. That is, if I can't have a level playing field, then neither should you. After all, it's only fair.
There isn't really a good solution to this.
If everyone has the same price, then people in poor countries are likely to pirate.
If prices are adjusted so that it is expensive in rich countries and cheap in poor countries, then everyone is going to buy copies in the poor country, one way or another (either via resellers, establishing subsidiaries there, etc)
And if one region locks the software, then that makes people unhappy because they bought the product and want to be able to use it world wide. And it is hard to geolock computers, anyway.
I think just one price and have it constant everywhere is the best option. At least then you don't end up with situations like having everything super expensive in Australia just because.
If they dropped the prices in one poor country, everyone else will complain about "if you can afford to sell if for X in country Y, you must be ripping us off selling it for Z here."
Probably the best strategy is just to have one constant price, let the people in the poor countries pirate, and establish some kind of "pirate redemption" system targeting those areas to get people to spend some small amount to "upgrade" to a legit version. Then set that amount to the reduced amount one would have charged in the poor country in the first place.
Z
Why limit it to a country. Why not states? Or counties? Cities? In California alone we have many cities well over $100,000/year and others well under $10,000. Which arbitrary geopolitical line do you chose?
More germane to those of us in the US is why not limit the price that can be charged for drugs to the maximum charged anywhere else in the world. If it's profitable there, it can be profitable here.
Bottom line is that it is the legal responsibility of corporations to put their shareholders' interests first. Or, in the analysis of the movie "The Corporation", the corporation is a psychopath.
~~~~~~~
"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.
The most evil idea ever committed to paper. It's killed hundreds of millions.
But hey, it sounds good and makes your heart swell with pride, right?
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
Most games are already cheaper in the steam store in Mexico, except for a few ones that sell for the same retail as console games, which are just in US dollars, if you combine this cheaper prices with the same discounts available in the Steam Store some games get so cheap that piracy it`s unnecesary. My game library it's already over 360 games and growing, with most games being purchased on sales. Now, if only they sold the HTC Vive here...
The USD is currently worth 33% more than the CAD. Canadians are, on average, not paid as much as their American counterparts for the same jobs. That probably means we're paying nearly 50% if not more than someone in the USA for the exact same software.
#DeleteFacebook
If you don't price your product based on GDP then you are not a true communist or socialist.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
... as long as you factor in national deficits as well.
What part of "Commercial" does the dumbass who posted this not understand?
Take a look at this video from Adobe's CEO, clearly avoiding this question from an Australian user.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78yigV0GYGQ
MAGA? Make Americans Grope Again?
How about pegging it to my salary? When I'm unemployed I'll buy the biggest IC design CAD package I can!
Mostly random stuff.
Even Lenin abandoned it for the New Economic Policy/plan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
When Lenin thinks your idea is too communist, it's probably a bad idea.
It's more profitable to charge a few people a large amount instead of charging a few more people a smaller amount.
If they cut the price to one tenth the price then they have to sell ten times as much just to break even.
First, the author of the article doesn't seem to know of "commercial software". Ok, that aside, this isn't some massive ground breaking idea. Businesses already use different pricing tiers and models in different countries. It may not always be based on X (X = GDP here) but pricing is a critical business decision that pulls in many factors. It's not a flippant decision. And all this applies to software businesses too.
The fact that it's only sold in the App store now?
In which case you just connect to the app store for that country from wherever you are - I have accessed the Canadian store from Europe and the US without a problem in the past. If they eventually block that then you go through proxy and if they try to stop those they just end up playing whack-a-mole. Getting the money to the right store would be the hard part but if someone makes it worth their while I'm sure there will be resellers shipping iTunes gift cards to wherever the software costs significantly more.
The only way to preserve a price difference between two markets is to make the cost of getting around whatever barrier there is more expensive that the difference in price.
US sells software at $200 because if GDP, but it is $30 in Latveria. People will go to Latveria, buy all the copies and ship to USA to resell for a $150 profit each.
If they sold it at a lower price in a 3rd world country, it is possible that people will buy the low cost version and resell it in the higher cost location. First Sale Doctrine let's the "publisher" set the price for the first sale. Then limits their control after that.
Small countries with low appearing GDP, may have a much higher PCDP/GDP Per Capita. So wealthy citizens get an underserved discount. Multinational companies might opt to buy their software in the country it costs the least in. Large corporations having a lower software cost would encourage outsourcing jobs from higher GDP countries.
This isn't the way to level the playing field, this would be a means to level the higher GDP countries, by encouraging outsourcing and encouraging domestic wealth transfer to lower GDP countries. So what this really is, is a tax on higher GDP countries. Do you really thing Saudia Arabia deserves to pay less for software that controls oil fields and production? By the time you make enough exceptions it becomes unworkable.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
on how much of a Marxist you are
'Fair' is where you go to sell your pig, not the means by which you set the price.
That's only partly true. If your pricing is extremely unfair and what you produce is essential to people then governments can get involved and laws get changed to cut you profits, especially if you rely on those same laws, such as copyright and patents, to create artificial monopolies. This is happening with the pharmaceutical industry.
In the past Canada has threatened the patent protections of some firms and more recently the US seems to be finally waking up to the crap that these companies are pulling. So while you may set your price at a level that you think you can get away with, perceived fairness is a factor in what you can get away with and you ignore it at your peril.
Because it costs an absolute fortune to sell existing software here. And shipping must cost 15% or more of the price. Yeah. Right.
In my company we have such an approach for specific areas:
- Our training prices are linked to the GDP, in a few levels. In the lowest band countries this can be 40% of the full price. We do need enough participants however to cover the effort of coming over. Our training is an enabler for the software, it is mainly cost recovery.
- For specific software and services there can be special country promotions to boost adoption also in lower GDP countries. We don't do that explicitely for everything though.
An approximation of this was done by many publishers with textbooks. The result was importation of the cheaper overseas editions of textbooks into the US. And the US Supreme Court ruled that the First Sale Doctrine covers imported copyrighted works.
Do you really want a gaming company to sell its games to an oligarch in Russia at roughly 3.7 times less the price of what they would cost in the US? Besides, it's not like a game is a vital piece of software to own. And in poorer countries, it's not like everyone owns a computer fast enough to run the latest game, or owns a computer at all.
And where it comes to non-gaming software, there are other ways a company can make sure its software goes to people who can afford it. It can create student licenses, language localized editions, versions for non-profits, nagware software, software which produces watermarked assets, web hybrid applications, open source software with various levels of support, etc. There are thousands of options, but ultimately the company making that software has to make this kind of decision for itself based on its own capabilities and based on what it thinks the market can bear.
In some countries, making payments can be so difficult as a consumer, that selling a piece of software at a fraction of the cost based on a country's gdp wouldn't necessarily work. And in other cases still, a company could easily cannibalize its own local customer base by providing competing foreign customers with cheaper software.
Some of these articles are stupid, every product is marketed and priced to sell in a respective country. Obviously you make better margins where you can and lower prices where you have to. Products are distributed world wide, but prices are still regionally determined.
If this is a government imposed price control then not only is this a bad idea but one that has lead to the destruction of entire nations and killed many. Price controls enforced by the government do not allow the market to adjust pricing to meet supply and demand. Without proper market pricing we get hoarding, black markets, etc. Price controls is socialism. In socialism people wait in lines for bread, in capitalism bread is lined up waiting for people.
If a company chooses to control prices based on local markets then expect much of the same. If software is cheap in some nation where people don't make much money then expect a black market to pop up to buy low locally and then sell high somewhere else. Software makers can try to enforce this GDP based pricing with location enforcement of some kind but that's not too difficult to fake for the properly motivated.
Didn't textbook publishers already try this? They'd sell textbooks in other English speaking nations for cheaper than in the USA in order to compete better and/or comply with socialistic price controls on books. They tried putting different covers on those books but that didn't stop people in the USA from buying them, the content was still the same. Efforts to make the content different enough to matter costs money, negating any profit motive in selling the same books at different prices.
I cannot fault people for wanting to make a profit on their products. What they seem to fail to understand is that the world has gotten a lot smaller. I've gone to online retailers and orders products from Taiwan and Australia before. They arrived in my mailbox a week later. If I ordered from a domestic seller I'd sometimes get it overnight, and that has some value to me. If the price difference is large enough I'll wait that week if I can.
When talking about bread, textbooks, and so on this is a physical product. Software is not a physical product, the media might be but when is the last time you saw actual media in a software box? When was the last time you actually bought a "box" of software?
Just a bad idea. If actually implemented anywhere I'd expect it to die quickly.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
This is the same idea as textbooks. There is the US edition and an international edition. The international is often 50% the US version for identical or close enough material. Book publisher got pissy if US students bought them.
Our President does the groping. You just stand there and let him.
So a 1st world programmer has to pay $1200 for theri development kit while it's sold to a 3rd world developers for $70 or even given a way free.
Then the 3rd world developer is allowed to directly compete for work with the 1st world developer as if the both lived in the 1st world country.
Products should be sold for the same price in both locations since labor is forced to compete for living expenses and it's more expensive to live in the higher GDP country.
Unless you just want a lot of unemployeed people in the high gdp country.
This is literally extracting wealth from wealthy countries leaving less to circulate in the economy.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Software is a luxury .. like ivory dildos and IPAD/POD/PUD. If yo po' then you just do not buy. What a company wishes to charge is of-course their own choice ... though not obscene and burdensome contract (EULA) details.
Kinda like a company president who forces American workers to train their foreign import-replacements. HE gets a bullet in the head for free ...
MAGA? Make Americans Grope Again?
Monica Lewinsky called. She wants her blue dress back.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Should price based on GDP or Per-Capita income?
I was trying to start something called Shared Source License, that would protect the publisher from copying while keeping the original authors vested (creative/financial interests) in any forks & vice a versa. However, all my whole code bases was stolen and I'm now looking for psychiatric help to cope with the losses both personal and professional. So tread carefully .... the hit (wo)men walk among us.
Yes, if this idea were implemented, it would just make it even more economical to cut tech jobs in the first world countries and send that work to the third world where both labor and now licenses for software tools would be much cheaper.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
Make poor nations pay US$ 200 or 2000, buy a dongle, pay per seat or core, or rent per month.
Poor nations then have the option not to enforce software and copyright laws.
Don't peg anything to GDP. Just keep offering US brands at US$100 or 1000 or some other fee.
Digital enforcement is expensive in every nation. Once a nation is very low cost with exchange rates, whats keeping users globally from buying in that nation?
Per nation price enfacement with activation and per nation ip tracking per account?
Face local digital return laws and refund laws, tax collection per nation?
It will cost more to sell cheap than any poor nation can support in local profits after tax, support, lawyers.
Users won't pay US$10 or $50 for a "legal" version in a poor nation? What for? Support? The next version is "free"?
They can get their own translated copy for as a free download or on physical media for a few $ at a local market.
Games might be the only way to lock in users with multilayer per user accounts.
A $10 game pass in a poor nation vs $120 in a normal nation? The constant hunt for digital sales online of account details been used in wealthy nations?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
WTF nonsense is this?
> This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses
Slashdot: declaring the imminent doom of proprietary software for 20 years
Should extremely targeted software be priced according to the broadest possible metric?
All of this should essentially be up to the software developer, to price things according to who their customers are in various markets.
Now what I have read about is some app developers out of a spirit of charity, making apps free in some extremely poor markets (like Africa and India) to help out the population there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sales reps of all types always try to sell for the highest amount possible. This highest amount will depend on what's possible.
Also, sales reps have quotas that reflect regional disparities.
If it didn't work like that, sales reps wouldn't take the job. Therefore, there would be no sales.
From the perspective of the business that makes and sells the software, the best option is leasing. And to some degree this already goes on. This requires an always on connection, but it lets you expand into other markets at discounts and much lower cost entry points (as long as it is still profitable, which for software, once it is created, sale of said software is essentially 100% profit) without having to worry about profiteers taking the discounts that you offer to some and spreading them back to your primary markets. You might still sell licenses to first world markets for say $4000 each, but in developing countries, you can offer leases which require an always on connection and intermittently phone home to confirm they are being used as intended. The lease only requires an initial payment of maybe $400 per seat and $200 per seat per month after that, cutting the up front cash to 10% of the purchase price. If the cash flow benefit is greater than the lease cost, it should be widely adopted. You can cap the lease at $4500 or some such and then let the third world companies convert to licenses if you want.
Just straight discounts on goods due to a countries financial status is a bad idea for many reasons well outlined by other posts. Life saving drugs and food are a different story, but they are also necessities which puts them in a different light than software used to make money.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
This is for any product. I can't believe you can get away with regional pricing any longer. If you are going to offshore production and onshore indentured servants / slaves who in the "rich" country will be able to afford your products? This is likely the real squeeze people are feeling. Fall off the tech merry go round for a second and try to live on the median or oven bottom 25% income and get back to me. Most people that fall off try and support the differential via debt until that explodes. I have seen it personally several times and it isn't pretty.
"A thing is worth, whatever someone is prepared to pay for it" -- Democritus, circa 400 BC.
How is it that, as far as I can see, nobody mentions that Steam is doing exactly that (pricing per country), with relatively smart region-locking (if you want to buy from a country, you need to be in that country [yes, there are VPNs but that's not always working, and I doubt many people actually do that).
But once you bought your game/software, you can use it wherever you want, no lock for use. Oh, gifting is region-locked, yes, but that's pretty logical.
All in all, it works rather well.
Whenever I hear anybody talk about fair share or fair price or even common sense laws/pricing I know it's time to run for the hills because I'm going to be screwed.
The entire concept is a straw man argument. The assumption is that some mythical entity can afford to pay or not pay some price and that the company making the offer can somehow recoup their costs because they are overcharging some other mythical entity. No proof is given to justify the equation except, perhaps, anecdotal evidence that there are entities that can't/won't pay the asking price.
It's SOP that this scheme is only applied to intangible items because nobody would buy such an idea for something tangible like a car or a house or even a bag of groceries. Art, education, entertainment and computer software and always included in this scheme.
Fair == bullshit scammer
GDP isn't the right metric. If we used GDP the price would still be too high in developing countries. The correct metric is GDP per capita, or purchasing power parity.
Problem is you would need to region lock the software then through yet more DRM.
It seems to me you should be looking at the commercial viability of particular markets and not the dismal per capita income of the population as a whole. Licensing AutoCAD isn't going to break the budget of a $10 million dollar construction project in Central America.
is there a way to make that pricing more fair?
Reduce copyright duration to two years and the "problem" will go away.
~Loyal
I aim to misbehave.
My company would immediately move our data center and probably IT to poor companies to take advantage of the cheaper software prices and the cheaper maintenance costs.
Because people would abuse the process like they do for every other product that tries to accommodate local pricing considerations, with software this is even easier to do, a nice VPN and suddenly you are paying Ethiopian prices instead of US or UK prices. Open internet means such ideas simply don't work as people will work around it to get the best price.
That's the answer to this problem. Rather than rely on dated business models companies should release the complete set of code and work out new business models. What that might entail depends on the software one is producing. However there are opportunities in releasing a complete set of code such as increasing the size of your customer base. My company sells hardware- but we fund a lot of free software projects because it adds value to our product offerings. Without funding such projects we wouldn't be dominating the markets we compete in. We do have competitors, but nothing to freak out over. We have the advantage at every turn.
because.
1) they are doing it(I bought doom 10 euros cheaper than in europe. chinese blurays are all the rage in asia. some of them legit).
2) the price of producing software is not really dependent on how much money the buyer of the software has.
3) are you really so fucking daft that you want to make it illegal to gray import software? seriously? you want a full on trade war or what?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Isn't it fair that they charge a similar price to a similar quality product in the poor country? So if it is a very useful product that is much better than what can be produced locally then it is worth more. Alternatively, it allows a local software industry to grow with opportunities of providing a much cheaper product that has just the right features required. Eventually they may be able to build a product with the same quality and features as the foreign product. If the big companies dump sophisticated software at basement prices they actually take away incentives for the development of local products, that would be considered by many to be unfair. Others might see a company in a low cost country exporting goods and services to a high priced country as an unfair advantage. You can think about the other nuances, there are some much more sinister ones involving selling your sophisticated product cheaply in a 'poor' country.
I think it is fair for companies to charge what they consider is a fair price, and the consumer to say yes or no. Companies risk new competition, criticism and sanctions or boycotts if they overplay their market power. Price is not the only form of unfairness, selling something the consumer doesn't need with fancy advertising is not very moral either. Even using cheap labour to produce a product that is over-priced in its country of manufacture may be very fair if its a Gucci handbag or a Nike runner because it would be very unfair to let the local populace think that they actually need these items.
If you need the software, then each respective government should legislate that certain pieces of software are freely available (exempt from Berne Convention). For a wealthy western nation, this seems unlikely and unnecessary, for a poor nation this could solve their infrastructure problems.
But almost nobody needs a particular piece of software.You don't need Office 356. We were writing our college papers in LaTeX long before Office became established. And there are a several free and a dozen inexpensive alternatives to Microsoft Office.
Violating international law is usually only a problem if you've pissed off the wrong wealthy organizations, a narrow set of exceptions lets you choose your battles carefully.
A lot of current federations and unions muddy the waters. If we push the issue. why should we do this at the country-level rather than the (non-sovereign) state-level? People in Oklahoma make far less than those in New York. Should we shift pricing based on jurisdictions? Local minimum wage? Other demographic concerns?
I live in a Middle Eastern country with an informal caste system. The effective minimum wage for foreign-born workers is much less than the effective minimum wage for citizens. Should non-citizens here pay less for software because they earn less?
A lot of current federations and unions muddy the waters. If we push the issue. Why should we do this at the country-level rather than the (non-sovereign) state-level? People in Oklahoma make far less than those in New York. Should we shift pricing based on jurisdictions? Local minimum wage? Other demographic concerns?
I live in a Middle Eastern country with an informal caste system. The effective minimum wage for foreign-born workers is much less than the effective minimum wage for citizens. Should non-citizens here pay less for software because they earn less?
[Repost: My subject line was deleted the last time. Oops.]
I laughed at the subject. It had "pegged" in the title. You'd think the editors would choose a less ambiguous title. But noooo, I get these images conjured up of womyn with their large dildos.
There's a slightly convoluted way to answer this question, but basically if there is a market for something then the "market" will find a solution. In the case of software piracy, if people in country X can't afford to buy the software they need/want AND the company who makes the software is unable or unwilling to enforce its IP in that country then people will pirate the software. I work with software that costs in the tens of thousands per seat and I hear about this happening in low GDP / income per capita countries. The interesting thing is that the piracy is concentrated on the more expensive software and they shops there tend to use only the (relatively) highly priced software. In countries where IP is more strictly enforced there are 3-5 competitors who make similar software with more reasonable pricing. They can't sell in the low GDP countries even at a lower cost because of the piracy of "industry standard" expensive stuff which is effectively free. I've heard stories about government departments installing this sort of software routinely on workstations. The problem with this is that problems can be solved in a lot of different ways, when everyone is using the same tools and is trained from the same pirated manuals and tutorials then the solutions are going to be limited to what those tools can do. In my country I've seen prices of run of the mill software decrease as competition increased. Reducing prices by location isn't the answer. Giving the small guys incentive to create a competing local product will.
1. Stop honoring BS US copyright law. Given enough countries, the whole copyright export concept will be in jeopardy.
2. Go open-source. $0+(local time) is always pegged to GDP.
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Per https://ello.co/shanen0/post/n... the software that increases productivity is investment and extremely poor societies can't afford those investments because essential production is already absorbing all the available resources. Or in other words, there's no sense in trying to squeeze blood from a turnip when he doesn't even have a turnip.
Entertainment category software is different and there is no rationale I can see for discounting it. Right now I'm having trouble thinking of any software that would qualify as essential, at least in the context of an extremely poor society.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
So the companies that pretend to be from Ireland, they could just setup shop in another country for purposes of buying software at a discount? That's dumb!
So why is it legal for companies to outsource for lower wages, but it is illegal for people to outsource for lower prices?
The US government, the best money can buy.
I believe that for over a decade, almost all DVD players have been region-free, the exception being US or North America market.
Else, there are often remote-entered codes to unlock the player.
Of course people won't be interested in a DVD movie in the wrong language(s).
DVD in French-English might work in most of Africa but won't work in South America or Turkey etc. as far as people clearly understanding what's said by characters.
but then all the customers would feel cheated, that they have to pay a premium, ...
also if you want to sell in their local currency it becomes an accounting nightmare, :-/
> Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly?
Because that's not how supply and demand works.
For the same reason that iPhones and Honda's aren't pegged to GDP... the costs of R&D and production don't change and make a product less costly to produce because it is sold in a country with lower GDP.
If prices are pegged, is this to be voluntary or mandatory?
If it is voluntary, then go ahead and try to convince people. This slashdot article is a good effort in that direction Problem is, no one will listen; companies are stupid and people resist change.
If it is mandatory, you are forcing your views on others - you are deciding what they should do with their time and property. This is wrong, unless you are acting in self-defence. It is in fact the root of most problems in the world.
Like the others said, this can't work, with the EU being the perfect example for this. Geoblocking cases are already progressing through courts, with legislation being added to outlaw these. But, on the other hand, you have member states with vastly different economic strenghts.
MAGA? Make Americans Grope Again?
Monica Lewinsky called. She wants her blue dress back.
Kenneth Starr wore it to Trump's inaugural ball.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
Because GDP is a pretty broad statistic and conditions in one part of a country are not the same in another. Also, it might not be accurate.
Lets simplify the issue here: Can software makers charge what they feel like? It is their product, and if they charge too much, the invisible hand will bring that into line. Free trade. If I wanted to charge people in Britain 10 times as much because I didn't like Brexit, nobody really has the authority to say elsewise except the market. If someone is buying cheaper copies from somewhere else, that is a EULA violation and can be handled as such in the courts, since an EULA is a contract.
Software should be pegged to the size of Uranus!!!!
Steam (and other game companies) sells games under half of the US price in Mexico, but it's not related to GDP or out of fairness, it's the bottom line. They know they won't sell many games at $60 (median professional take home is $300 a week), but $25 is attractive enough, and the more people playing a game, the better it sells, so there's extra incentive for them to sell it cheaper.
Microsoft took a similar approach for lustrums, by letting cheaper markets pirate their software freely, then grabbing enterprise and government contracts, without much care about the small business or the home market. Again, not out of fairness.
Autodesk and Siemens have also alternate pricing on emerging markets.
Let the price be a % of your personal income. Now if you start buying a lot of cheap software and reselling it, you will be makoing more money and have to pay more the next time you buy software, capping your potential.
Regional pricing already exists on Steam (http://www.pcgamer.com/the-weird-ecomomics-behind-steam-prices-around-the-world/). When I worked in Kyrgyzstan (low GDP country), many games were significantly cheaper than in the US store.
I don't even know what that means.
If we were talking about a commodity like prescription drugs, the marginal cost of each additional pill is probably a few cents. Companies can make a profit by selling to foreign countries at prices much lower than USA prices because there is a ban on bringing the products back into the country.
The marginal cost of creating another copy of a piece of software and issuing a license key is practically nil, but there's no good way to enforce an import ban. If software companies (I'm thinking EDA software like Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc.) started selling cheap software licenses overseas, customers will just set up their license servers in a country with "fair" prices and have their USA/European employees point to those license servers.
Bad idea. It would practically be a death sentence for companies making expensive CAD software.
In the end, there will be problems if it is not.
Why don't software makers look at the average income level in a given country -- per capita GDP for example -- and adjust their software prices in these countries accordingly?
Because in places with massive Gini co-efficient, where there's a large amount of inequality like Saudi Arabia, the per capita GDP isn't indicative of the median income. All it takes is one rich motherfucker to raise the price of goods for the masses? That doesn't seem fair if you're trying to charge a percentage of income.
Because software is trivial to sell across state boundaries and you'd face arbitrage. People would buy the cheap version, and bring it or transfer it to the rich country. Because no matter what crazy legal or technical scheme you just thought of to try and thwart that you'll have people legally renting the product from some poor minnow farmer and using a VPN to make it think it's in Laos or some such crazy shenanigans to try and save a buck.
Because it's not necessarily more fair to charge a rich client more money for the same product.
And if you ARE trying to charge people a percentage of their income rather than a fixed price, and you could somehow magically make the software stick to that individual and only that individual, then why not just do that? Ask them to report their income, and then charge them a percentage of that. Surely they won't lie, right?
But that's an odd sort of progressive pricing structure I'm not sure about.
"This presupposes the continuing existence of closed-source software businesses"
That's the sound of you drinking the Kool-aid so hard you almost drowned.
Specialists in whatever country are free to charge whatever the market will pay them to support free (as in speech) software. Non-free (as in speech) software is just another form of economic colonialism.
People who choose to use commercial software get the high prices they deserve. They shouldn't get any special discounts because of their country's economy. We should be doing everything we can to push everyone toward Free and open source software solutions.
Why not ask the same question to Drug Makers ? In both industries, after the initial R&D or certification investment has been made, the incremental cost of producing another copy is trivial.
It's sorta off-topic, admittedly, but...
It's interesting that the editor chose to call out the assumption of the continued existence of the closed-source software businesses, without calling out similar precepts (eg: the continued existence of money, or countries). I mean, if money ceases to exist, then doesn't the question of pricing become moot? What about an asteroid wiping out life on the planet: that would also, presumably, substantially alter the economic dynamics of software pricing.
If you're going to call out exceedingly low probability future events to exclude from consideration, why stop with just one? Alternatively, why call those out at all?
You're almost right. The sales in other countries only have to beat the variable cost (also called marginal cost). This is possible because the US purchasers are covering the fixed costs through their higher prices. This allows pharmas to recoup their investments really quickly from US buyers and go into other markets without a fixed cost component. The US buyers ARE subsidising other countries' purchases by paying the fixed costs up front.
If the US buyers got the same price as overseas buyers, those overseas buyers would see a price increase as the fixed costs got rolled into the body of consumers.
There are poor people in high GDP countries too!
I earned $14K last year living in the USA.
I'm living mostly off savings currently.
H1b VISA guy took my job.
Gas prices here in Colorado vary greatly depending on whether you're buying in an elite resort community (Aspen, currently $3.24 / gallon) or a working-class community (Longmont, $1.99 / gallon). There's nothing wrong with that, as long as people are free to fill a couple 5-gallon cans in Longmont and haul them up I-70 to Aspen. I.e., as long as there are no restrictions (other than your own convenience) on your ability to circumvent regional pricing. In the software world, that means no regional DRM.
And unlike the time and effort it takes to haul around a heavy physical commodity like gasoline, a software installer can be instantly downloaded from anywhere in the world. So one might think that a regional pricing scheme (without regional DRM) would be doomed to fail. However, there are convenience issues: the online app store might not be in your language of choice, and it may not sell the software localized in your language of choice. So there's a few ways a seller could exploit regional differences. They should be free to do so, as long as they aren't imposing regional DRM.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Games are different because their only utility is as entertainment, and few businesses can derive any benefit from that.
A professional or collegiate e-sports league is a business. Just as a league needs free video editing software to avoid having to pay to license proprietary video editing software, a league needs a free game to avoid having to pay the game's publisher for a license for each machine on which the game is played and for a license to perform the game publicly when streaming the matches.
same way the minimum wage should be calculated(comes to ~$13) these companies should have a CPI based formula and that determines the regional price.