Windows Vista World Price Rip Off (was UK)

[Arrowcatcher]

While it's just been pointed out that the UK Vista Ultimate price is
£369 (723 USD), I see that Home Premium is £219.95 ($431) and is 329
Euros on the German Amazon site.

This really begs some questions, namely how in a time of "free trade"
and a low dollar can Vista be priced so outrageously in the world
market? I can't imagine any significant number of persons paying so
much money for Windows. Just name the continent - South America,
Australia, Asia, etc. - as XP fades away, people are going to be
shopping alternatives. I can't imagine Windows keeping its world
dominance for more than a few more years at this rate. When it loses
some critical mass of users, Windows is over. But maybe Microsoft now
only wants a North American market and is deliberately discouraging
offshore Windows use. Them pesky Norwegians, Chinese, Indians,
French, etc. are just a lot of trouble and not profitable markets
anyway.

 

[nicholas hall]

If I was strong I would say F*&K you Microsoft I am not going to be paying
£369 for the ultimate version of Vista, but I am not so I will be there in
PC world in early February to buy my full version of Windows Vista and I
shall also be buying the full version of office 2007 Pro (another product
that is being over charged to UK (plus other non USA countries) consumers).
As for buying it Vista (or office) on the net I think that is a none starter
as if you go to a US website to try to buy them for the UK you will find
that the purchase would be declined.
I do not think they are too worried about none American people moaning about
the inflated price of it products (Microsoft is not the only company that
seems to over charge for it products, Adobe and the late Macromedia
certainly over charge) as long as its core market is happy?

IMO

NIK

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[Mike]

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While it's just been pointed out that the UK Vista Ultimate price is
£369 (723 USD), I see that Home Premium is £219.95 ($431) and is 329
Euros on the German Amazon site.

This really begs some questions, namely how in a time of "free trade"
and a low dollar can Vista be priced so outrageously in the world
market? I can't imagine any significant number of persons paying so
much money for Windows.

The retail price doesn't matter. Only a very small percentage of people
will buy it at retail and install it themselves. The vast majority will
get it with their next PC purchase.

It has always been this way.

Mike

 

[Michael Price]

Something else to consider is that the UK price probably also includes the
VAT which is around 15% I think. The US list price does not have any taxes
added to it.


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[Dale]

Maybe much of the higher prices worldwide, including the US, for Vista is
due to piracy and theft of Vista and other Microsoft products.

And what are you complaining for the Chinese for? Apparently they get it
for free and that increases Microsoft's market share from 98 per cent to
98.2 per cent, therefore it is profitable for them to have it for free... at
least to some readers of this news group.


If you don't like the price where you are, just move to China.

Dale

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[arachnid]

Maybe much of the higher prices worldwide, including the US, for Vista is
due to piracy and theft of Vista and other Microsoft products.

Nope. The price of Windows will be the same with or without piracy.
As a monopoly, Microsoft is able to charge the maximum price that
consumers will pay instead of being forced to thin profit margins by
competition. What consumers are willing to pay for Windows will not
decrease even if all Windows piracy ends overnight.

So, ending piracy will not reduce the price of Windows.

 

[Mike]

And what are you complaining for the Chinese for? Apparently they get it
for free and that increases Microsoft's market share from 98 per cent to
98.2 per cent, therefore it is profitable for them to have it for free...
at least to some readers of this news group.

It makes sense to those who understand Business 101.

Mike

 

[Arrowcatcher]

The retail price doesn't matter. Only a very small percentage of people
will buy it at retail and install it themselves. The vast majority will
get it with their next PC purchase.

It has always been this way.

I'll be interested to see how many people configuring a $1000 desktop
on Dell.com elect to pay an extra $400 for Ultimate when they make
that PC purchase. Or someone configuring a £600 desktop in the UK
deciding to shell out £369 for Ultimate. Competitive off-the-shelf
desktops will likely all have Home Basic and rarely more.

 

[Guest]

On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 21:02:44 -0600, Dale wrote:

So, ending piracy will not reduce the price of Windows.

But reducing the price of Windows will go a long way to reducing piracy, me
thinks.

 

[Lang Murphy]

Well... I don't have any metrics on this but I would have to assume that MS
makes very little money, comparatively speaking, from folks buying retail OS
bits. I would guess that the majority of Windows income comes from OEM and
Enterprise licensing. I have not bought a retail version of Windows since
Windows 2.1. Not saying I'm an SME on this... just adding my two cents to
the thread.

Lang

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[Erik Funkenbusch]

While it's just been pointed out that the UK Vista Ultimate price is
£369 (723 USD), I see that Home Premium is £219.95 ($431) and is 329
Euros on the German Amazon site.

This really begs some questions, namely how in a time of "free trade"
and a low dollar can Vista be priced so outrageously in the world
market?

Have you looked at the costs of everything else on the world market?
Granted that vista ultimate is about 80% more expensive and Home Premium is
about 66% more expensive, but lots of things are a significantly more
expensive in the world market than in the US.

Let's take a simple example. Let's look up a popular book on Amazon.com
both in the UK and US.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400044731
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Suite-Francaise-Irene-Nemirovsky/dp/0701178965

In the US, the retail price is 25.00 and the UK price is 16.99 which comes
out to $33.00 or about 32% more expensive.

Let's try something else. How about other software. Photoshop Elements 5
costs $99.00 retail in the US and 69.00 pounds in UK which is about $135.00
US, or about 35% more expensive in the UK.

Let's look at current Windows pricing. Windows XP Home Edition is $199 US
and 176.99 Pounds in the UK which is about $347.00 US, or roughly 74% more
expensive. Why weren't you complaining about the price of XP 5 years ago?

 

[Robert Moir]

Something else to consider is that the UK price probably also
includes the VAT which is around 15% I think. The US list price does
not have any taxes added to it.

VAT is 17.5%, and for VAT to account for the difference in price here, it
would have to be at a rate of very slightly over 100%.

 

[Robert Moir]

But reducing the price of Windows will go a long way to reducing
piracy, me thinks.

Not really. People have been known to pirate shareware or budget priced
games or other similar items with negligable prices.

Folks can try and dress up piracy as "because the stuff is too expensive"
but at the end of the day pirates are just dishonest people who are
"stealing" software because they can't be done with paying for it.

 

[Mark Gillespie]

On Fri, 29 Dec 2006 00:44:05 -0000, <Arrowcatcher> wrote:

I can't imagine any significant number of persons paying so

much money for Windows.

They don't, thats why piracy rates are so high. If Microsoft lowered the
price, or did a web download/online purchase of a key, for a much more
reasonable price, many less people would resort to pirated versions, and
the problems these versions entail...

 

[Paul-B]

Folks can try and dress up piracy as "because the stuff is too
expensive" but at the end of the day pirates are just dishonest
people who are "stealing" software because they can't be done with
paying for it.

Not neccessarily true. There are many reasons why people pirate
software, one of which is price. Here in the UK I can buy a genuine
Windows XP Pro for around £80. With Vista looking to retail at more
than twice that amount people who can't afford to buy it will either
stick with XP or use a pirated version of Vista, both courses of action
will have absolutely no impact on Microsoft.

If Microsoft put Vista on the market at the same price as XP I would
think that a lot more people would buy it.

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to how much Dell pay for each copy of
Vista? I bet it's a lot less than the general public have to pay.

 

[Robert Moir]

Not neccessarily true. There are many reasons why people pirate
software, one of which is price.

If you pirate software you are dishonest. It's an absolute truth.

Here in the UK I can buy a genuine
Windows XP Pro for around £80. With Vista looking to retail at more
than twice that amount people who can't afford to buy it will either
stick with XP or use a pirated version of Vista, both courses of
action will have absolutely no impact on Microsoft.

The latter would represent a lost revenue opportunity, or at least,
certainly that is how it would be counted.

If Microsoft put Vista on the market at the same price as XP I would
think that a lot more people would buy it.

Lots of people "steal" XP at the current price. Lots of people "steal"
shareware, budget software, and penny candy from corner shops. Blaming it
all on a high price ignores that.

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to how much Dell pay for each copy of
Vista? I bet it's a lot less than the general public have to pay.

Well yes but to be fair, they're buying the OEM version of Windows and we're
talking about the full retail priced version. Got to remember to compare
oranges to oranges and apples to apples here.

I want to emphasise that I don't agree with Microsoft's pricing here, I
think it's a shameless rip-off and another good reason (on top of Vista
pretty much sucking anyway) to buy an alternative product. I just don't
agree with blaming piracy and the like on price and nothing else. "wah wah
wah I can't afford it otherwise" is just a poor excuse from a thief, one
that wouldn't be acceptable if they were stealing cars from the factory gate
and one that should be equally unacceptable for software piracy.

 

[Paul-B]

If you pirate software you are dishonest. It's an absolute truth.

I agree with that. All I'm saying is that one of the reasons software
is pirated is that of price. Not always because "they can't be done
with paying for it". Reducing the price will reduce piracy.

Whatever Microsoft do the hackers will defeat, meanwhile people are
paying for buggy, bloated software while Microsoft struggle to fight a
battle they can't win. The average man in the street will not use
pirated software because, IME most of them have no idea that pirating
exists, and even if they do they have no idea how to get hold of it or
how to use it.

 

[Kevin Spencer]

The price of any product is not determined by some arbitrary "morality" but
by market demand for the product. A business like Microsoft, in fact, any
business, is *in* business to make money. Now, I know how "immoral" that may
sound, but ask yourself - why do you go to work every day? You go to work to
make money, to make a living, because it takes money to live in most of the
world. A business is simply a group of individuals who are all working
together in cooperation to make money. Therefore, the primary task of any
business is to make money.

Now, as the purpose is to make money, what determines the price of a
product? Obviously, if you have had any experience with selling anything
(and most of us have at some point), your goal in selling is to get as much
money as possible for what you sell. It is the goal of the buyer to get the
lowest price possible. And in fact, in many countries, haggling over price
is a common practice. Note that the haggling is not coercive. Either party
may choose to abandon the negotiations at any point, no foul, no harm done.
Therefore, as there is no coercion involved, there is nothing "immoral"
about either party's part in the negotiation.

Following me so far? So, a business is simply an aggregate of individuals
working together to make money. This is where the word "corporation" comes
from: the root word is "body," as in one entity made up of many members: E
Pluribus Unum. A business is therefore no different economically-speaking
than an individual. A business which creates a product or products must
decide the price which it will accept in order to exchange product for
money. This process is done using the law of supply and demand.

The way it works is, supply and demand have a converse effect on each other.
Each has an effect on price of commodities. If the price of a commodity is
high, it lowers the demand for such. This means less sales of individual
products. The total sum of the product sales is the main constituent in
profit(the amount of money that is made), along with the cost of production.
If the price is low, demand increases, and more products are sold, but at a
lower per-product profit. Again, it is the total sum of all profit which is
important. Therefore, any company or individual must decide at what price
the total profit will be the greatest. The price-to-profit spectrum is a
bell curve. At the low end of the price scale, there is not enough money per
sale to offset the cost of manufacture. At the high end of the scale, demand
becomes so low due to high price that there is not enough total money made
to offset the cost of manufacture. Somewhere in-between these 2 lies the
"golden" price factor, the point where maximum profit is achieved.

So, with companies as with individuals, the market dynamics determines the
price of the product, not the "morality" of the company or the individual.
If you, like many others most likely, think the price is too high, you are
free not to buy. There are always some who do not. And that is also simply a
fact of life. It is not "outrageous," any more than the weather.

--
HTH,

Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
Bit Player
http://unclechutney.blogspot.com

Where there's a Will, there's a William.

 

[Tom Lake]

The way it works is, supply and demand have a converse effect on each other. Each

has an effect on price of commodities. If the price of a commodity is high, it
lowers the demand for such.

Ah, but is an OS in which businesses have invested billions of dollars in training
and
have acquired years of experience with really a commodity? There are no other
OSes which make an acceptable substitute so the price of the OS is fairly inelastic.
People need it at any price so sales don't decrease when the price increases.

Tom Lake

 

[Jupiter Jones [MVP]]

Thieves already steal regardless the price because it is their nature.
Piracy may be cut a little, but there would always be those that would steal
regardless the price.
Even if it were free as long as downloaded from a specific server, some
would still distribute copies and others would download from the
illegitimate sources.

To a thief, anything they disagree is not a "reasonable price".Price is
little more than an excuse the thieves use to justify their activities.
Some buy into this flimsy excuse, I do not.