Why on Earth is Microsoft moving to Euro pricing now? I find it quite amusing that a company would decide to have uniform pricing right across a continent in a currency that looks like it might not survive the phasing in period of the new pricing regime. But that's what Microsoft seems to be doing. As El Reg has pointed out, pricing is now to be standardised on the euro price …
If your an average punter you could just buy a digital copy and pretend your from the states. My win 7 copy was purchased like that, Its probably breaking some tax law or another but sod it, then you just pay the value based on the current exchange rate..
call me stupid but apart from the obvious reason for not doing this for everyone, Greed, whats stopping them or? is it just Greed thats stopping that?
This is a real problem. It's been a long time since ordinary punters actually saw real installation media and so "the product" is actually a 25-character text string. That's not hard to "import".
Do we have any evidence that the 25-character string identifies where the licence was bought? Are copies of Windows regionalised like DVDs? Am I just giving Stevie B ideas by asking such questions in public? (Probably not. I doubt that Windows could legitimately refuse to function just because it detected that it had emigrated from its place of origin. Surely...)
Unless something has radically changed, then I'm pretty certain that an MS product licence for the USA will be valid for the same product in Europe and that this situation will not change. MS cannot tie their customers to a particular national alliegiance. There are a couple of soft restrictions though - i.e. if you're buying online and your address is a UK address, they may direct you to buy from a UK store. This is not unique to Microsoft. But it's only a soft restriction. If you can get the Microsoft (or Amazon, or whoever) site to sell you from a different region, you still get the same and legal product. E.g. I occasionally buy things from the French Amazon site. I just have to make sure it doesn't bounce me over to the UK one when it realizes where I am.
But as you recognize in the subject line, this is not about business use. For businesses it is different.
I'm unclear as to why this should signal a price [i]rise[/i], btw., Whilst some of the European economies are stronger than ours (i.e. Germany) I would have thought we're above the average. Thus we should be benefiting from a reduction to the European average, rather than having to rise to meet it. Price discrimination is actually beneficial for poorer purchasers. Look at the housing market for an analogy. It would be lovely for poorer people if the average house price wasn't pushed up by the purchasing power of those wealthier than themselves. Same for software licences.
@mikeo
"Oh come on, it's refused to function for far more feeble reasons than that..."
I brought my office Windows 7 tower system home for a weekend. Minus the external USB disks, plus a change of IP address and hey presto, it claimed that I had a stolen copy.
I'd been looking for an excuse to install Linux instead, and that was it -:)
Another scenario: Dual boot with Home Premium and Ultimate. Boot from recovery disk and watch one of them get deleted.
You brought your work tower computer home for a weekend?
Desktops\Towers are typically presumed to be stationary and for that reason are not generally encrypted.
It claimed you had a stolen copy because it was no longer able to connect to your company's internal Key Management Server.
"I doubt that Windows could legitimately refuse to function just because it detected that it had emigrated from its place of origin."
Of course MS is entitled to do that. It is a licensed product and you have to agree with the terms.
If MS choose to add regionalisation to the terms they can.
IfMS choose to add terms forcing you to eat granola for breakfast they can.
Of course MS are very unlikely to do this. They are already on the back foot and more restrictive licensing is not really in their best interests.
Many corps are already sitting on the fence about switching to Linux and MS is still seem to be a slightly safer bet. Onerous licensing terms that could restrict international businesses from functioning might just be enough to nudge them off the fence amongst the penguins.
Is that it's basically the DM with rounding errors. Greece leaving will achieve nothing except to switch attention to the next weakest domino (probably Portugal). The only way to save the € is for Germany to leave (possibly taking Benelux and Finland with it). It ain't going to happen, of course. To quote the PM of Luxembourg, Jean-Claude Juncker: "We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it."
A single currency can't really work without a single government. The breakup of the euro zone re-unites political power with financial repercussions. That is a good thing, unless you want a single European government. Not only would a break-up encourage good behaviour, but it also helps insulate the good actors from the bad ones. The EU is not the same as the US but in a different place. Most Americans want to be American. Despite PC (pl)attitudes of non-xenophobia, most French are French first and European second. That's true for pretty much every country and it becomes exaggerated when the Germans are bailing out the Greeks and are demanding they severe financial restraints. It isn't that the restraint isn't needed, its that someone else is telling them what to do. Would New York be able to do that to California?
Think what the the US would be like if the civil war went on for centuries and not between North and South, but between every state and every state had its own very unique culture, language, clothing, religion and physical appearance. That is what Europe is like.
The problem with the Euro is that Europe isn't a country. Its just an idea in the mind of politicians who have failed in their own country's political system. This is where we find out that "too big to fail" is just Newspeak for "give us your cash," not a statement of reality.
Is in a Euro currency country.
Probably HQ for Middle East & Africa too.
They also do Localisation for S. America (Particularly Brazil) in Dublin. But there is a more logical reason for that than Euro Pricing.
Would Sterling Folk "Like" the Euro to fail, even though it would hurt UK terribly? The Euro may be ill-conceived and Greece being allowed to join idiocy (better if UK had joined), but unravelling it all would be more painful for everyone (Europe, Asia, USA) than continuing to bandage Greece.
Mines the one with EMEA economic outlook in the pocket.
(if you ignore the silliness about the Euro) but the problem with price differentiation is when your customers find out or have it rubbed in their faces. Say I'm an IT directory at a €30 business and I land a new job at a €300 business. I'm going to try and make a name for myself by pushing the price down. The board may even be so pissed off about it that they chuck out Microsoft altogether.
I've seen ti happen!
Scare thing is, Windows (probably Office also) has built in localisation locking. They never enabled it in 7, and not sure if it was in Vista or not. But back on the release of 7 when they discussed the feature the feeling was it would hurt international flyers who's copy of Windows would cease working when they landed on the other side of the pond as the license wasn't valid and the machine would brick itself in good ol' black screen of death licensing issue style. From this move, it seems this issue has been fixed sadly now....or as a side idea someone's come up with a lovely pop up when you land outside your region of it asking for more money...but MS would never try that would they :P
"I find it quite amusing that a company would decide to have uniform pricing right across a continent in a currency that looks like it might not survive the phasing in period of the new pricing regime."
Why? They just found a new best friend in Nokia. It seems they like embracing dying entities these days, perhaps because they're the only bridges left unburnt...
If any supplier were to set prices along the demand curve, i.e. at the absolute maximum that any given customer will pay, (and this is tricky to determine) they will always be at risk of being beaten on price by any other supplier. Since they would be charging well over the cost of supply any other provider can come in, charge less, win business, and do so without needing the great economies of scale that Microsoft has.
Price is determined by supply and demand in the market, not just by Microsoft itself, if it gets it wrong it will loose business.
I understand its tempting to think there is no alternative to paying what Microsoft want, to fill your office with PCs, but in reality there are alternatives. Microsoft have to get their prices right just like any business or some smart provider comes along and gives everyone in the company a Mac.
Even if Mr Rich is willing to pay $3.50 to have some one shake in the sugar into his tea, he is also happy to pay $1.00 to have someone else shake in the sugar the same cuppa.
You're confusing market opportunity (tactical accounting) with enonomics (strategic accounting).
Economics proves that being the lowest cost offering gives you no room to manuever. If you come in as the cheapest option they you've got no where to go & no way to make a living. Look at Sun Micro.
The insane scale these companies operate at can't make the math work if pricing isn't optimized.
Look at it this way, even if the Euro was liable to fail, Microsoft now won't allow that to happen. Joke.
You make good points about how Microsoft's game plan ought of be to squeeze the maximum money from each customer for the good or service provided, although when it's computer software with the customer using their own hardware, then it costs Microsoft about the same to supply 1 or 1000 licences for software, and if someone pays twice as much in total for their 1000 licences as for the 1, then Microsoft should sell them the 1000.
But the European "Common Market" has rules specifically intended to stop sellers from abusing their customers according to where they live. One or another European body has enforced non-rapacious mobile phone and mobile data service charges for international travellers in the EU. Also, Microsoft's abuse-of-monopoly business practices have been subject to European authority corrections, and may be soon again - this thing where Windows 8 tablets will only be allowed to run one web browser program, Microsoft's. So, really, this probably falls under the heading of Europe not allowing Microsoft to divide and conquer the European market for their goods.
"Or Switzerland?"
Switzerland is still stuck with prices calculated when the USD was worth more than 1.5 Swiss Francs. The Franc is currently worth slightly more than the USD,
It's daft that I can buy a Mac Mini for not much more than the full retail price of Windows 7 Ultimate.
Apparently Switzerland will see a drop in the prices of Microsoft's products as a result of the realignment of prices. In my opinion that is long overdue. As far as I am concerned they are too expensive at the moment.
Ah well, it's given me a taste for running Linux. Not everyone's cup of tea, but it suits me fine and I don't feel like I'm getting mugged by the prices.
To be fair, there is a couple more than one non euro country in europe
Albania, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus (north), Czech republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hungary, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Poland, Romania, Bits of Russia, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK and the Ukraine
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If the MSFT sales and services organisations are not nihilistic enough across country boundaries already, then this for me seals it.
If European MSFT subs are not going to opt for more devious tactics against each other in meeting Ballmer's quarterly 'round table', then I'd be amazed.
If this is not a cheap trick to raise shadow margin on key (big value) deals for the company in government accounts, I'd be amazed.
The lowest-performing subs will suffer since their alignment issues to the Euro are already clear and I see blood, sorry, change ahead for the EMEA subs structure.
called Home, Business, Power and Might Actually Work With Enough RAM.»
Loved it ! After reading this, I'm considering purchasing new memory cards for my main box, which only has 16GB RAM at present. That because I sometimes have to boot into Windows on my Linux/Windows dual-boot when retirees with problems with their Windows computers ring me for help....
Henri
Software is not cheap to produce. It takes a number of programmers months and years to produce some software. That has to be amortised across the production run. For Windows(TM) with it's millions of copies it's quite cheap. My software which has taken two of us two years to write and we sell probably a thousand a year is a signficant cost on each item.
How do you explain GNU/Linux's pricing structure then? Its fair enough to shell out for support, or specific software perhaps, but pay that for an OS?
Your software is in an entirely different category to Windows - if they were that upset about missing licence fees, they'd chase after the rest of the world who use cracked copies. but they don't...
Whenever there is a mismatch between prices you'll find someone willing to step in and make money on the difference. Given normal conditions there is nearly zero financial risk in doing it. Economists will say that it helps the market be more efficient. That Microsoft's UK team can undercut the French team is one example. The pricing is not at parity across currencies (probably never is). Is it illegal to play the arbitrage game in the EU? Probably not when you're on a massive scale, but I bet the average Joes are strictly barred from it...
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