[joefife]

At a tangent - I'm quite worried about software licencing costs due the divergence in fortunes of the USA and the UK.

As a UK small business, we've seen software licencing rises between 10 and 40% this year, on software purchased from US companies. Clearly, those companies must price for their home (and much larger) market. But, it is making it much harder to budget for software commitments, and to buy the tools needed to run and secure small and medium businesses.

I realise this isn't a problem to enterprise, and there's nothing anyone here can do - this is just my observation working in the SME space in the UK.

[rlpb]

> Clearly, those companies must price for their home (and much larger) market.

I don't think that's true. They can be expected to price to maximise revenue and that can mean pricing differently in different markets. With software licensing that's relatively easy to do since the marginal cost is near zero and arbitrage across markets can be blocked. Just make geographical restriction a term in the license agreement.

Therefore, I don't think that any need to price for their home market should affect the UK market. If prices are high, it's because their costs are higher or it's because the competitive force isn't strong enough.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination