On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 15:17 +0530, Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote: > I wish I could elaborate based on what I know given what I'm doing > these days, but all I can say is: you're off on the wrong tangent.
the MS anti-trust agreements are public, and neither in the US nor in the EU do they require MS not to engage in differential pricing for other jurisdictions, or even for different target markets in different jurisdictions. MS does a lot of the latter (windows - regular, not the 3-application version - for $3, say, typically for developing country education and public sector). MS engaged in differential pricing for countries, too, in at least one well publicised occasion and others that were well publicised. due to the success of thailand's low-cost PC programme based on linux (MS was too expensive), MS provided the _standard_ edition of windows xp + office (NOT the stupidly crippled "starter edition") for $40 [1]. this did not violate any anti-trust agreements or regulations. however, it did make quite clear that MS didn't need to keep the price uniformly high across countries, and gartner even predicted that MS would have to reduce the price, globally, a position with which MS naturally disagreed (quoted in [1] too). in at least two other cases, however, in israel and brazil, MS was asked to provide the same price as they provided in thailand, for public sector procurement, since it was clear MS could provide the software at such a price, and software has no country-specific production costs. if MS did have lower prices in some countries, they could face pressure from more consumers in rich countries, shocked that the software is available at lower prices elsewhere. this, plus the difficulty of enforcing price differentiation in different markets due to the practical difficulty of limiting parallel imports, is why MS prefers to keep a uniform (and uniformly high) price worldwide. anti-trust has very little to do with it, except as a cover story, and not even that, MS doesn't use that argument often (maybe they do in india?), since "we want these prices in EU and US and can't restrict parallel imports, so we keep the same prices worldwide" is obvious, straightforward, and perfectly legal. so shiv wasn't really far off the mark. and it's not just MS; same situation with many other easily copied knowledge goods, from music and films to pharmaceuticals, though in the latter case national price controls mean that it is consumers in the US that pays ridiculously high prices and subsidises global drugs R&D (and pharma profits, not as high as MS's monopoly profits but in terms of sector pharma has the highest margins of all). -rishab 1. http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0,1000000121,39115884,00.htm
