So we Brits aren’t happy about the inflated price of Micro$oft products.

http://www.computershopper.co.uk/?news/news_story.php?id=106025

Apparently Windows Vista Home Premium Edition (Upgrade) costs $153.99 in the States (approx £78.50 ) and £144.99 in the UK. It just needs a stronger pound to be spot on double!

Certainly it seems a rip off but I do have to admit to some (slight) sympathy. Internationalisation is no simple business. I’ve just spent the morning wrestling with upper casing “º” to “ª” and not “_” as it tends to come out if you don’t do it properly. Which rather upsets any Turkish folk typing into upper case only fields.

Gone are the simple days of  c -= ‘a’-'A’;

You need to have a locale specific function that checks what your regional settings are and maps characters appropriately.

So I can see that it does require extra work to put out a UK version and the US is always going to be a bigger customer base (and software costs are basically  development time / units shipped). However, twice the price seems to be a case of what the market will wear not what the product is worth - but then isn’t that how most pricing is arrived at?

If you’ll pay that much they’ll charge that much, the only solution is don’t buy it.

Does that sound like M$ threatening the EU? You make life difficult for us and we’ll make life difficult for you (where “You” is the EU Commission and “you” is all the companies and individuals in the EU).  I think it could be interpreted that way

There is some debate how much a problem this will be - most corporations won’t want to roll out a new M$ (or any but I’m guessing especially M$) Operating System on it’s first release and maybe Europe will gain from the rest of the world being beta(*) testers. However, if we don’t have versions to test and don’t have versions to test against (I can already hear my customers “It don’t work on Vista”) we must be behind the curve (is that the correct marketing speak?).  Then there’s the international support / compatibility implications - the US office is on Vista the UK isn’t…

The EU & M$ is a battle of the giants and the only thing we can be sure of is neither is fast mover.

(* yeah I know Vista has been in beta, but a) I doubt it’s totally bug free yet & b) I can’t remember what comes after beta - feel free to remind me!)

Liz Kindly commented - what comes after Beta? Hell