Windows 7 To Sell In UK For Half the US Price 487
An anonymous reader writes "In the UK, a full version of Windows 7 Home Premium is going to cost less than half the price Americans will have to pay, and in fact less than Americans have to pay just for the upgrade-only edition. Full details and prices were published in an article on CNet, in which it was concluded that, at least for the time being, Microsoft is honoring the prices it set for the now-discontinued European version of Win7, which did not contain Internet Explorer 8 and was only available as a full-install edition."
Well, considering.... (Score:3, Interesting)
...most will just DL it anyhow...does it really matter? ;)
Arbitrage (Score:5, Interesting)
This will lead to people indulging in arbitrage [wikipedia.org].
Unless, of course, Microsoft has somehow put in a mechanism that disables a UK-bought Windows 7 when someone attempts to install it on a computer located in the US.
Re:Good news for others (Score:3, Interesting)
Congratulations Steve, I'm installing OSX in a VM soon.
This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
The price for my country was going to be twice that in the US, let alone the UK. I dont remember any outrage about that.
Yea, it sucks, but other people most probably have it worse off than you do. Or they use linux.
Re:Translating it into English was really cheap! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah I mean that translation was difficult. It's the same version they sell in Canada.
Re:Yeah? So? (Score:5, Interesting)
[Metric system -] is the U.S. the *last* hold-out?
Nope, you're in good company with Myanmar (Burma) and Liberia.
(less facetiously, the UK still uses miles for distances and miles per hour for speed, and fair number of people still use feet & inches for human height)
Re:So will it be region locked? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Niklaus! (Score:4, Interesting)
The funniest thing about that post is that you didn't even manage to spell his name properly!
Re:Good news for others (Score:3, Interesting)
it's pretty much the same thing since a EULA is an agreement with the copyright holder
Wrong [wikipedia.org].
Re:Yeah? So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Artificially enforcing price discrimination should be illegal. Countries have used tariffs for many years to try to balance the value of a cheaper import good with that which is produced locally to make their own products more competitive.
One example of the end result is a huge glut of corn syrup usage in american foods, whereas if there were no tariffs on cane sugar importation, sugar would once again be the primary sweetener used in food industry instead of corn syrup. This is market inefficiency at its finest.
Perfect discrimination is the antithesis of a free market, where the populace collectively determines the value of a product based on what the populace is willing to pay. Imagine instead if Microsoft really had to compete for it's operating system market share-a huge chunk of their marketing budget, which is formidable, would be reallocated to development. The end result would be a better OS.
A sure indicator of the absence of free market ideals in Microsoft is their absurd profit and the proportions of money they spend on lobbying, marketing and PR versus what they spend on development. In a free market, companies compete on value, price, quality, etc. MS' only real competition is legislators and government actions.
Re:Good news for others (Score:5, Interesting)
He never said the VM wouldn't be on an Apple machine...
Funny, but I find it flabbergasting that Apple still does not allow non-server versions of OS X to run in a virtual machine [macworld.com], even on an Apple machine:
Re:Translating it into English was really cheap! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah I mean that translation was difficult. It's the same version they sell in Canada.
Having lived for years in the US (several states), UK, and Canada (Ontario & BC), I can assure you that Canadian English is as close to American as to British, but is distinct from both. Yes, Canucks spell colour with a "u" and so forth, but they also use the US "-ize" ending instead of the Brit "-ise" ending on many words, leading to particularly Canadian forms such as "colourize". In vocabulary, Canucks use US words such as "crosswalk", "sidewalk", and "apartment", rather than the Brit equivalents, and adopt the US meaning for "chips". As in the US but not the UK, words in Canadian are as likely to be imported from Italian as from French (e.g. "zucchini" rather than "courgette"). However, Canucks appear to be split or undecided on the vexed question of whether to use "aluminum" or "aluminium".
FWIW, I am not originally from the US or the UK or Canada.
Re:Arbitrage (Score:2, Interesting)
Traitor! I'm telling the Queen on you!
Re:Yeah? So? (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't be intentionally dense and dramatic. Every corporation desires perfect discrimination, where each customer is given the opportunity to pay the largest sum they think it is worth. I don't blame companies for seeking discrimination because that's what they do-make money. Microsoft hasn't suffered any downward pressure in pricing from the free market on it's OS products in 15 years due to their illegal monopoly.
No, I don't want to "interfere" with the consensual purchase of any MS product. What I would like to see is that any person, anywhere can buy any MS product they want without licensing restrictions forbidding it. So if a Mandarin speaking customer in the US wants to buy the Chinese version from a Chinese vendor for a fraction of what everyone else pays, the EULA can't deny you a license to use based on your location.
It's a global marketplace, but Microsoft, and more so the MPAA, view each country as a little isolated retail island. MS uses EULA terms to enforce this, and the MPAA has DMCA-backed region coding.