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Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you allowed to do that? Or to put it another way, if you got raided by the BSA, would they have a problem with that?
how would they differentiate from someone like me, who has software bought in the US, while living in the US, but who now lives in the UK?
Its not only Aus. Example: price of Creative Suite® 6 Design Standard is USD1,299 versus GBP1,227, despite the fact that the exchange rate is around 1.55. For some stupid unknown reason, Adobe will usually charge the same unit price in GBP as they do in USD. They will quote "cost of operating" is higher in the UK, but 55% higher? Bullshit.
Don't forget the 20% VAT which is included in the British price. The US price doesn't include any tax.
If they can charge it, they will.
That assumes all companies charging an extra percentage are actually paying their VAT bills as well.
I wonder how the piracy rate in Australia (for CS and more generally) compares with that in the US. Anyone have any figures?
Can someone explain why tech stuff in general is quite a bit more expensive in Australia comparatively?
The big retailers have a cartel like influence you could argue. Just about everything not made of pulverised rock or grown in pulverised rock is imported from somewhere. This allows what should be tech commodity businesses to charge what the market will bear, rather than competitive prices. A bit like mobile carriers in the states really.
Australia has a high tech take up, but its a very small market with a high dollar, so it's easy to get your dollars without worrying about volume.
Can someone explain why tech stuff in general is quite a bit more expensive in Australia comparatively?
Two main reasons. 1. Australia is a small market, so for a lot of things there are poor economies of scale and/or cozy oligopolies. 2. Exchange rates. Then along came: 3. Artificial market segmentation. Region encoding, per-country versions and so on. There's no technical reason for this, it's done simply because (thanks AUSFTA) it can be done. The artificial segmentation didn't used to be a big problem until the AUD…
I once bought a new Thinkpad on ebay from a guy in New York who ordered them in sight:unseen to resell to Aussies. He had no idea why they were so expensive here, he just saw he could make a bob or two reselling the retail US models for 2/3rds the Aus price.
Voila, monopoly in action. I have both a grudging respect and an intense dislike of Adobe for their complete ownership of the creative software space. It's kind of amazing, and it's the clearest example of a monopoly that I experience in my everyday life. Well done, I guess?
> Adobe for their complete ownership of the creative
> software space
Can someone explain why tech stuff in general is quite a bit more expensive in Australia comparatively?
I've heard that setting up shop is quite expensive in Australia due to a number of factors, and that the online prices is matched up to the retail price to avoid hurting profits.
These articles take the wrong perspective - it's not that Australia is much more expensive in tech matters, it's that the US is much more cheap. I don't know where the recent Australia-specific articles are coming from, but it's been like this since as long as I can remember - that the US is much more cheap than any other country I'm familiar with for tech stuff, including Australia, but also almost every other count…
I think they are coming from the inquiry into overblown prices that the Australian government is currently pursuing: http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/news/16114230/tech-gian...
Can someone explain why tech stuff in general is quite a bit more expensive in Australia comparatively?
"The revenues generated by Adobe’s Irish unit represent 55 per cent of Adobe’s worldwide revenues of $4.2 billion in the year to the end of December 2nd 2011"
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/finance/2012/1012/122432...