Resellers smack down Microsoft's 'single-digit' price rise claim Microsoft says that a planned overhaul of volume licensing pricing due in the summer will be capped at single digit percentage rises. Redmond said that Open, Select and Select Plus agreements struck in the UK after 1 July would be aligned to euro prices and charged based on the exchange rate with sterling. "Based on the …
"Microsoft is offering clear and equitable pricing for customers and partners"
Does that mean that any individual daft enough to want to pay for Visual Studio at home (like I was a couple of years ago) can now import it from the USA rather than pay some grossly inflated MS UK price?
Cos that wasn't allowed a couple of years ago.
I mean Region Codes on DVDs I can see some logic in (those celebs can't do their promotional tours everywhere at once), but wtf is the justification for not permitting cross-border trade in boring old MS software?
Years ago I I purchased Dreamweaver 4 (iirc, came with Fireworks 4 as well) in order to maintain several (semi-commercial) websites. The program wasn't all that bad IMO but when looking back it obviously left much to desire.
Now; Microsoft also has an HTML editor; Expression Web. I demo'd version 4 last year and decided that this was actually pretty nice. Expression Web 4 came with Expression Design 4 which basically gives me the same "Dreamweaver 4" like toolbox but supporting modern standards (obviously it can do php, asp, etc.). Funny thing is that even the color scheme of the splash screens somewhat matches (green & red).
SO; I go to the Microsoft store, the Dutch counterpart, and there is was: "Expression Studio Professional", available only in English (which obviously isn't a problem) and 'only' E 189,-, whether I pick the boxed version or the downloaded version. That alone is a bit odd, but ok...
And so I go to the US store. Easily done with the click of a mouse button (change your country; in my case from 'Nederland' to 'United States').
Guess what? NOW Expression Studio Professional only costs $149,95 and is available as a download only. So that's E 115,-.
So quite frankly such news doesn't surprise me at all!
Not long after hearing about this price rise, strangle enough we got through a lovely Audit spreadsheet from Microsoft.
So here we go again... Microsoft audits you, declares half your legitimate software as being fake (yeah that g doesn't look right in "genuine") and demands it to be replaced with their new more expensive agreement.
Sales must be down following the recession so time to extort some money from your customers.
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