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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?
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?
Because it would be illegal, duh!
Problems solved, once and for all.
captcha: harping
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.
So, apart from a meaningless renormalization that is only a display issue, everyone makes the same amount of money. Because they can buy the same amount of things, right? Congratulations, you have just invented communism.
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
You mean overseas countries like the Netherlands, Canada and UK not to mention all the other European countries are 'ignoring trade pacts' with the US? Huh?
Yes, unlicensed manufacturing is going on in places like India, but the fact of the matter is that the drug companies are charging insane amounts of extra in the US because they can. After all, they seek to make profit, so to them, the price is set carefully to the point that allows them to extract the most profit out of any given economy. The pharmaceutical industry is in a position in which people often have to buy their products or they will die. This is what allows them to ask prices that are way beyond what their actual R & D costs are. Look at the chart from this article outlining the costs and profits of the largest drug manufacturers. All of them spend more money on marketing than R & D and all if them have large margins, with Pfizer making as much as 43 % proft. These numbers are unheard of in any other industry, and they're solely the result of the american medical system's private nature which robs hospitals and states of effective ways to buy drugs cheaper. Instead of the Federal government or a state buying drugs in bulk, each private hospital chain has to buy them separately. This, combined with the fact that insured individuals don't really care how much the price is as long as it's covered by their insurance is what's put the US so far behind other developed nations in drig-polices and allowed the pharmaceutical industry to become the most profitable industry in the US.
There's no way for example European economies to 'force' these companies to sell to us at a loss. The prices they get selling their drugs to us are still profitable to them, butt because most non-US economies use differing forms of collective bargaining among other sensible policies, we're able to negotiate the prices down. A lot. The common counter-argument to this is that if the US started limiting drug companies' abilities to make as much profit as they currently do, they'd stop R & D and we'd run out of new drugs, but this is false. All of the companies can afford to sell the drugs much cheaper than they currently are being sold in the US and still make solid profit.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
> 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.