On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 08:07 +0530, Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote: > The explanation I got from a Microsoft rep was that as a result of > anti-trust regulations, they were not at liberty to offer special > pricing without approval from their anti-trust lawyers in the US.
this is true. but this is in order to prevent MS reps from offering previously more common and illegal deals such as "whopping X% discount if you ONLY ship MS pre-installed with ALL your hardware, but 0% discount if you sell even one box with something else". i believe not very different deals (e.g. for "gold" MS partners) are still common, though of dubious legality. > Microsoft licensing has three categories: MS reps may not be able to easily go beyond that, but nothing in anti-trust regulation would prevent MS anti-trust lawyers in the US from approving a 4th category, such as "regular consumers in poor country X". unlike tied, bundled or other selective-with-leverage deals such as the example i provided, country-wide price-setting is not likely to fall foul of anti-competitive regulators. however, it _is_ likely to attract the attention of _consumers_ in richer countries who will wonder why they are forced to pay high prices when regular consumers in other (poor) countries can pay lower prices. such attention is not as commonly drawn by special pricing for special groups of consumers (such as government, or 1000+ copy volume buyers). of course MS is not nimble. but nothing (in anti-trust regulation) prevents them from ponderously setting a company-wide policy of poverty-based discriminatory pricing. that would of course bring them price pressure in rich countries and perhaps lower profit margins. so they adopt the big pharma model, of treating india as a market of 10 million consumers. as in "10 million who can afford the rich-world prices we would like to charge".[1] -rishab 1. i'm not sure, perhaps this came from novartis. but i can check.
