Microsoft Raises UK Cloud, Software Prices 22% After Brexit-Fuelled Pound Drop (techweekeurope.co.uk) 214
Reader Mickeycaskill writes: Microsoft is to substantially increase its prices for software and cloud services prices offered in British pounds in order to accommodate the sharp drop in the currency against the US dollar in recent weeks. Beginning in January 2017 on-premises enterprise software prices will go up by 13 percent and most enterprise cloud prices will increase by 22 percent, bringing them into line with euro prices. Microsoft said it isn't planning to change its prices for consumer software and cloud services. The value of the pound has fallen by about 18 percent since the EU referendum on 23 June.
Not just bitcoin (Score:4, Interesting)
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All currencies are fiat currencies. I mean seriously - do you not understand how gold standards work? It's not like there is a "free market" for gold. It's called a gold standard because a governing authority agrees to say a particular currency is worth X amount of gold.
Further, gold standards have nothing to do with internal economics. Gold standard or not, banking, credit creation, sovereign creation, and taxation works the same. A gold standard simply restricts exchange rates so that one country can't
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But more to the point, wth does bitcoin have to do with gold?
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But more to the point, wth does bitcoin have to do with gold?
It's the same idea. People think gold standard is great because it's a relatively fixed amount of mineral to peg your currency against which gives it a fixed volume of currency. Bitcoin has the same property but created mathematically / limited by processing power available.
One of the problems of course is that having a fixed amount of currency limits the size of your economy, which is a bad thing. But the gold standard is an easy concept to understand, so people like it.
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It's not like there is a "free market" for gold.
Yes there is.
It's called a gold standard because a governing authority agrees to say a particular currency is worth X amount of gold.
Not a single country in the world does this. Zero. There is no "gold standard".
The value of the dollar is based on faith that people in power will continue to be competent and prudent.
The value of gold is based on faith the many people will continue to be greedy and selfish.
Which is a better bet?
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You were misreading the OP's tenses. There once was a gold standard. And he was saying that under the gold standard, when it was in place, everyone agreed to say a particular currency is worth X amount of gold. Under such a system, the value of the gold is not under a free market, or else the currency would be too.
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The fact is that metals-based currencies are far more arbitrary in valuation of a currency than a fiat currency. Why should a currency for any nation be entirely unlinked from factors like trade surpluses/deficits, GDP, interest rates and the like? What is it about gold that makes it so great for pegging a currency to? Saying "gold-backed is better" is really just picking an arbitrary element, giving it an arbitrary value, and somehow that is supposed to be a good way to value a currency?
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A similar thing happened to global silver prices due to Quin China's opium trade, at first as silver flowed into China as it exported opium, and then reversed itself when the opium was then shipped back to China.
Re:Not just bitcoin (Score:5, Interesting)
It does not have an intrinsic value that makes it worth weighting an entire currency on, and it is, in fact, rather vulnerable to price collapses itself. Both gold and silver have been witness to significant depreciation events, such as when the Chinese Empire began bleeding its silver reserves in the 18th and 19th century.
Metal-based currencies are no panacea, and are highly inflexible, and worst of all, don't do anything to stave off worst case scenarios like recessions and depressions.
Something's fishy (Score:2)
Only enterprise software, and not consumer software and cloud services? I think maybe Brexit is a pretense here.
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Lets arbitrage the fuck out of them. British versions will just need a few extra 'u's 'i's and 'e's deleted after grey market American import.
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Lets arbitrage the fuck out of them.
This move doesn't create an opportunity for arbitrage. It removes it.
Here is a free lesson in international marketing:
Q: How do you price an American product for the British market?
A: You change the dollar sign to a pound sign.
This simple rule of thumb has been true for at least 30 years.
Re:Something's fishy (Score:5, Insightful)
Every time a brexiter in denial with "oh they're just using brexit as an excuse".
No, you dumb bastard - if the GBP is worth 20% less then business either have to absorb a ~20% loss or increase prices. There's no conspiracy here. There's no clever accounting being hidden you by MAINSTREAM MEDIA LIES to make it look like the GBP has not seriously lost value when actually it hasn't. The fact is that the currency is no so useful atm. Just as investment in the UK in general is now not so attractive, not least because of a huge amount of uncertainty that investors hate - all that's really worth doing is buying chunks of UK business on the cheap, like our loss of our best technology asset, ARM.
It might be worth doing in the consumer sector because 1) they're facing serious competition atm 2) it's a smaller market anyway. But other business can't do this. They either run on much smaller margins, or they don't have huge reserves to release the pain more slowly. Sure, Carney has been making excellent use of public money to buffer things for now - his was the "emergency budget" that took place entirely within the executive sphere - but eventually he is going to run out of other people's money, to quote the old bat, and QE would just devalue the pound further.
I run a small business, but I'm already way worse off because everything I import costs a fuck-ton more and I can't afford to just bump prices up accordingly when my larger competitors already have huge warehouses of stock and have the power of scale to have negotiated pricing agreements. All the OMG RED TAPE that supposedly comes from Brussels is a myth, and what few anti-small-business legislation exists is hardly likely to be removed by the prevent government, whose ear is deaf to all but the largest enterprises.
Brexit is mostly a democratic expression of xenophobia that, because of no minimum turnout requirements, means the majority has to suffer heavily thanks to a third of the country being thick.
Mind you, I could be way worse off. Those northern working class voters who thought this would be to their advantage are going to be in for a hell of a ride.
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On the other hand, it is also quite interesting how big the disconnect is between most MPs (who were pretty heavily "Remain") and the general populace. Makes you wonder if there's a better
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Overall, I find it amusing how many Remainers want to redo it because of the relatively narrow margin, but would be screaming bloody murder if the Leave camp had wanted another one if the vote had gone the other way.
Do you find this [mirror.co.uk] just as amusing? It's Nigel Farage saying that if remain won at 52% he'd want another referendum.
Amusing?
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Is that the Scotland where Remain won in every district?
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So suck it up. You lost.
You are going to blame every single thing on Brexit until you find something that sticks... and if nothing sticks you will sabotage something.
Your position is that none of the shit that goes down over the next 5-10 years is due to Brexit? LOL.
I just want you racist tossers the fuck out of my country. Hopefully it'll happen soon-ish.
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Your position is that none of the shit that goes down over the next 5-10 years is due to Brexit? LOL.
Of coruse not. It's the immigrants fault. And Brussles (though Belgian immigrants get little if any blame). If anything bad happens after Brexit it's because we didn't Brexit hard enough.
Re:Something's fishy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Something's fishy (Score:5, Interesting)
I must add that this is an excellent point. Despite higher costs for imported raw materials, the drop in Sterling is working wonders for the UK manufacturing sector. Politicians on the left and right have argued and clamoured for a "rebalancing of the economy", i.e. boosting manufacturing; now they have it. Don't believe me? Read the UK's latest PMI report (https://www.markiteconomics.com/Survey/PressRelease.mvc/f55855e5e87b4e9dadc0e3cbea1c285f). To quote: "The weak sterling exchange rate remained the prime growth engine, driving higher new orders from Asia, Europe, the USA and a number of emerging markets."
Besides, those of us who read the financial press (as I do) will be well aware the central banks have long complained of needing a currency devaluation and a bit more inflation to help western economies. Britain has, quite inadvertently, achieved precisely this.
Rule Britannia? :-)
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Rule Britannia? :-)
You've still made the most hilarious self-inflicted wound that a democracy has made on itself in the modern era. I'm looking forward to the negotiations with the EU where you think you can have tariff-free trade without labour movement. That's going to be fucking popcorn time.
Enjoy your blissful, white, foreigner-free country.
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We haven't seen the shrinkage really get going yet. Next month when Nissan announces that it will be running down Sunderland and moving new production elsewhere will be the first major causality, followed by various banks. The short term boost from the weak Pound won't help when the stuff simply isn't being made here any more.
Don't forget though that rising inflation counters a lot of that growth. Unless wages are going to start rising much faster than they have been, what little growth there is will only h
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Okay, your imports cost more, so you should buy British stuff to have it cost the same. As an added bonus, your product will be cheaper than imports, making you more competitive......
Erm, you should have just wrote "I know nothing about economics" because that is effectively what you said.
This is my second favourite incorrect argument.
It is incorrect because new industries do not spring up just because things become more expensive due to the logistics and economies of scale. When you invest in new infrastructure you need a reasonable expectation you will get a return on your investment, selling low margin/high volume items exclusively to an impoverished nation is not conducive to
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I run a small business, but I'm already way worse off because everything I import costs a fuck-ton more and I can't afford to just bump prices up accordingly when my larger competitors already have huge warehouses of stock and have the power of scale to have negotiated pricing agreements. All the OMG RED TAPE that supposedly comes from Brussels is a myth, and what few anti-small-business legislation exists is hardly likely to be removed by the prevent government, whose ear is deaf to all but the largest enterprises.
Just as a counterpoint, as someone who also runs small businesses, but in my case tech-based ones that import very little but export information products and services, I have almost exactly the opposite experience.
The pound had been propped up for a long time and a lot of economists were saying it was overvalued long before Brexit was on the radar. Dropping it back to a more realistic level has already caused a big boost for our sales to customers over in continental Europe and beyond. It's dropped further
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And that's just B2B VAT, which is relatively sane compared to the way B2C works as of last year.
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Those predictions are certainly consistent with what the more informed people I know have been saying. In the short term, it seems almost certain that the UK economy will drop significantly in GDP terms. It's possible that this effect will continue for several years, depending on what if any post-Brexit deal with the EU gets worked out. But the worst of the doom-and-gloom predictions probably aren't realistic, because there are also areas such as those we were discussing before where the EU has been a negat
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I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say there. Did you reply to the wrong comment?
My previous comment was agreeing with someone else's view that Brexit will almost certainly reduce GDP in the short and possibly medium term, and then noting that there are various ways it might work out better in the longer term but no-one really knows what will happen that far ahead. I didn't say anything about subsidies, nor express any other opinion on Brexit.
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You fail to understand Brexiter logic. By suggesting that it is not unquestionably and undeniably certain that the UK will be the best country in the world for leaving the EU you have outed yourself as a remainer. For them, saying "nobody can know what will happen" == "worst doom and gloom prediction".
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I don't really understand that sort of generalisation, though I've certainly seen it a lot lately. About 16 million people voted to remain and about 17 million to leave. That's a lot of people, the majority of the adult population of the UK, so no doubt there were some delusional extremists and some just plain nasty people in there, but I imagine most of those millions of people probably weren't like that, on either side. Certainly I've talked to plenty of people from both camps who have been reasonable and
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When Britain joined the EU there were a few "bumps" along the way. A few sacrifices had to be made (e.g. good paying manufacturing jobs), and some "economic realignment" had to occur. The same is true of Brexit. But overall it makes Britain a more affordable destination for labor an manufacturing. Just wait, the leisure industry will also boom.
Re:Something's fishy (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you forgotten the IMF ballout, the Winter of Discontent and later Maggie going begging for a rebate because Britain was the "sick man of Europe"? We were shagged before we joined the EEC, and I hope leaving it's successor doesn't take us back to those dark days.
Talking of this recent event bringing back manufacturing jobs is bullshit that some politicians -- especially on the left -- like to peddle, but in fact if manufacturing comes back it will more likely be automated. Anyway, this depreciation doesnt allow us to compete with China's labour costs, or any of its competitors now that it is getting too expensive. When the pound dropped after the 2008 financial crises, the relative side of our trade gap didn't shrink... it's not price that's preventing people buying our products.
If half the international banking industry leaves then we'll end up with a gap in governement finances that will cause them to make cuts more painful than anything George Osbourne did in the last six years, I can guarantee that a boom in exports won't cover this difference. And as the economy contracts the size of the interest payments on the goverment's debts will become the fifth biggest expense... finance industry wins again.
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But overall it makes Britain a more affordable destination for labor an manufacturing.
How? If we start doing well economically then the pound will rise and that will wipe out the saving. The only way to keep economical is to keep doing badly or simply scrap environmental regulations and kill all of our rivers all over again.
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Oh stop with the Project Fear (TM) already. Just be more positive.
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As a Londoner, I'd be very happy if Sadiq leads us out with you (and maybe Bristol and Manchester will get the idea too), and let the rest of England fester in their poverty and bigotry.
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Yes, any time something goes wrong, blame Brexit
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resistance is futile (Score:3, Funny)
Re:resistance is futile (Score:5, Insightful)
What exactly does "sovereignty" mean here? Britain is literally sending out feelers all over the world looking for trade deals that will, now wait for it, limit its sovereignty. That is the nature of treaties.
Re:resistance is futile (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that Britain is agreeing to those trade deals. The treaties are not agreed upon by the EU and forced onto Britain. Being able to negotiate your own treaties is part of being sovereign.
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As demonstrated with the Canadian trade deal, they have to be unanimous, so a trade deal at the EU level could only be 'forced' onto the UK if the UK had already agreed to it.
Re:resistance is futile (Score:4, Insightful)
We don't really have much choice. We are going to have to do deals with bigger countries and groups like the US and EU, or face economic ruin. If they say jump, we can only ask how high or fall back to WTO rules and suffer the economic consequences.
Gibraltar is also likely to lose its sovereignty and become jointly run by Spain. There is no other way, short of independence perhaps as part of Scotland (!), that they can save their economy which is entirely reliant on there being an open border. Spain can simply refuse to agree to any kind of UK-EU trade deal unless they get Gibraltar, and the UK government will throw them under the bus.
Leaving the EU has massively reduced our bargaining power and attractiveness. Watch as companies pull out, starting with Nissan next month. In practical terms we have much less power than we did previously, and what we gained is mostly useless because e.g. what kind of a choice is kicking our Johnny Foreigner vs. economic ruin?
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and the UK government will throw them under the bus.
It's getting crowded under that bus, what with Scotland and NI already being there.
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All trade deals that had any impact on British sovereignty had to be agreed by Britain anyway - see the current CETA debacle as an example, where one tiny little irrelevant region in Europe can crush an entire treaty.
So your argument is incorrect, there's no difference in the decrease in sovereignty, Britain was always part of negotiations and acceptance anyway, the difference now is we're negotiating from a much weaker starting point - we only have 65million people instead of 580million people. That necess
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The treaties are not agreed upon by the EU and forced onto Britain.
Ok wise guy, name one trade deal forced on to Britain by the EU. You know one we didn't agree to but got anyway. (a clue: it didn't happen because trade deals have to be unanimous).
Being able to negotiate your own treaties is part of being sovereign.
We had trade negotiators in the EU. We were part of the negotiations.
So basically both major parts of your premise are false.
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And Scotland had their own "Stay" versus "Leave" vote, and decided to stay.
Your point, please?
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Which could have Scotland secede. They've been talking about having the vote again post-Brexit. Ultimately, it's up to the governed to decide how they want to be governed. Right?
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American actions in the American Civil War have resulted in an illegal military occupation of Texas.
That's what tends to happen when you play at insurrection and lose. Grow up and deal with it.
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The UK is basically a mini-empire.
Re:resistance is futile (Score:5, Insightful)
Except Brussels itself is a construct of all the EU members, and it is the pooled sovereignty of all EU members that counts. This claim that Brussels is some sort of overlord that controls Europe demonstrates a great ignorance of what the EU is.
Beyond that, all but the most hardened Brexiteers would love to stay in the Common Market, which was why they kept talking about how Britain could still remain part of the ECC.
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How many times do EU members want to bail out Greece? How many terror attacks must be tolerated that were aided by the EU's freedom of movement between member countries? The Brits had enough of it. That's democracy. France may be next depending on how their upcoming election goes. The ideals of the EU sound great but they aren't working out to every member nation's satisfaction. Once again, Europe has Germany to blame for a lot of what's going on.
Re:resistance is futile (Score:5, Insightful)
How many terror attacks can you link to freedom of movement? And the Greeks want to stay in the Eurozone (which is different than the EU) and it is pretty clear Germany wants Greece to remain as well.
And if the Brits had enough of it, how come so many Brexiteers were hanging on to the hope of remaining in the ECC (which, by the way, would still mean some degree of freedom of movement).
Frankly, I think Brexit was just an episode of national pique, and I suspect if you reran the referendum now, with at least some of the ramifications becoming clear (such as Norway objecting to continued British membership in the ECC), Remain would have a solid win.
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Even some of the most hard-right Brexiteers such as Daniel Hannan who has a massively long history of xenophobia believe that immigration shouldn't see greater control.
You're right, it really is only the genuinely far right fringes that are pushing that idea such as Jacob Rees Mogg and Nigel Farage. Even the hard-right aren't keen on the idea because they know we're so economically dependent on it.
Honestly, I suspect Farage admitting the whole NHS £350million was a lie within 2 hours of winning
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So you have one of the terrorists in the Bataclan attack, but there were also EU nationals in the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo attacks.
As to the period of disruption, with several major banks saying they're pulling out of London, you're looking at the diminishment of the City, which is one of the major economic engines of Britain.
All I see here is the usual Brexit tripe which amounts to "Migration bad, Europe bad, everything will just be fine!" But if that were the case, then why were the chief Brexiteers yac
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EU nationals by birth, sure, but their lineage is anything but. These aren't long established French or Belgian families who have suddenly decided to become terrorists. They are "migrants" or close to it. The longer this plays out, the more "nationals" they'll have. If they don't win by fighting, they'll win by changing the population from within. The media won't show it, but there's a rise in the acceptance of various nationalist parties throughout Europe. The stage is set for something really nasty
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Where I come from, we use a special term for the children of immigrants to our country. We call them "Americans".
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Terrorism is only an issue because (a) the media loves it because it makes them money and (b) the politicians love it because they get to ask for extra powers and smaller civil rights and (c) nationalists and racists love it because it gives them justification for their views.
In my opinion, none of that makes terrorism a real, existential problem. It should be calmly dealt with as a criminal act.
The big deal we make out of terrorism makes it stronger. You beat terrorism by taking away its voice, ignoring it
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I don't disagree. I'd love to live in a world without borders. The trouble is that it's a double-edged sword cutting off heads. I'm not sure how practical it would be to search some at the border and not others if you're trying to be an open border society.
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At least one of the Bataclan terrorists was tied to an individual that entered via Greece disguised as a refugee.
So you're saying it's okay if the terror attack happened in Athens instead of Paris, and damn that free movement of labour that's exactly why the French are under attack instead of say their foreign policy decision.
At least there's no terror attacks in the USA thanks to your insane border protection /sarcasm.
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but it's likely that Britain will emerge stronger for it.
We'll see. Saying it doesn't make it so.
If it were JUST britain, I'd be happier about it, and in fact glad to see you go. The whinging of racists takes up too much of my eyeball time as it is.
Re:resistance is futile (Score:4, Interesting)
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The whole point in the EU was to share wealth and bring all countries up to the same level so that the continent could move forward together.
It was a noble and sane idea, the problem is it's been rushed, which is why the euro has struggled, because as you say they pushed ahead with it long before that cross-continental equalisation of wealth and productivity had occurred.
So you're somewhat right and somewhat wrong, there was nothing wrong with the idea per-se, just the way it was implemented. I think some n
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Re:resistance is futile (Score:5, Informative)
The real irony of the situation (and the reason for my caveat); the three regions that are blocking the deal are Wallonia, the French speaking region of Flanders... and Brussels itself (albeit as a province of Belgium rather than as the EU).
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Re:resistance is futile (Score:5, Insightful)
The word "sovereignty" is like "freedom". People throw around those words as if they can do anything they want. Reality says you still have to work with your peers, it's just up to you to judge the best way to do it (and to accept the consequences when things start to suck).
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Yes we have the freedom to re-negotiate the same trade restrictions we had before we gave up the trade restrictions. Because if there's one thing we don't like it's unelected people telling us what to do!
Happy and glorious
Long to reign over us
God save The Queen!
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And if they instead lowered the price, would you say "Microsoft is trying to push people to use their services by discounting them and latter increasing them, when everyone is too far invested?"
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Because Microsoft absolutely isn't using Brexit as an excuse to hike prices.
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YOU US-IANS ARE SO FUCKED! (Score:5, Funny)
You stupid USians don't know what's going to hit you when Microsoft finds out that you illegally broke away from the EU 240 years ago!
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And thus our 240-year-long plan to intermarry with Native Americans finally pays off! I'm 1/16th Seneca; now give me my reparations!
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It's because English still lacks a proper translation for estadounidense.
They didn't raise the price (Score:5, Informative)
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And I have some cheap oceanfront property in Nebraska I'm selling at a cheap rate. You don't see Microsoft (or any other company) announcing price cuts when a currency surges in value.
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I love when companies do this (Score:2, Interesting)
But then when the money gains back value, the prices don't drop
They did not raise prices (Score:2, Insightful)
It is the British pound that lost value.
Notice how companies are quick to raise prices, but are very slow to reduce the prices when currency is strong (hint: Switzerland).
Not all is negative in this: UK may consider switching to OS software in the long term.
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Every cloud has a silver lining (Score:2)
Yet another practical reason to stop paying Microsoft! There is a plethora of excellent and transparent FOSS, which is growing every day. Because it is open-source and free, instead of continually reinventing the bicycle people can build new and more useful applications on top of infrastructure that already exists and can be freely reused. (As in the Unix software tools philosophy).
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Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
funny (Score:2)
This is funny, as more and more is clear the Pro-Brexit campaign was lying their ass off. the first thing they did after they won was break their big promise of spending billions of pounds on care. And now a lot of people who find out the thruth about being lied to by the Pro-brexit people are getting angry.. Funny thing is, they want a new round for voting, but that's being nixed.
Brexit was never good for anyone, expect the people who ran the campaign..
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The pound is the most mismanaged currency on the planet.
Britain fixed it's problem with unfunded civil service pensions by taking them 'off budget', accounting tricks.
Getting the Pound completely untangled from the Euro makes it an even better currency canary.
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Man. That's great.
Where is this free Linux cloud service where I can stand up entire enterprise architectures and applications securely, robustly, with fault tolerance and multi-zone availability? How have I not heard of this service before?
Oh, because it doesn't exist and you couldn't even be bothered to read through the first 4 words of the god damn title, much less the summary.
It's like Pavlov and his dogs - the word Microsoft shows up on this site and people just start hitting submit.
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Where is this free Linux cloud service where I can stand up entire enterprise architectures and applications securely
You can stop your rant right there. If you want security and to be sure your data and operations will continue predictably, don't use a cloud service at all. Why does it make sense to entrust your crown jewels to a bunch of complete strangers, who use computers you know nothing about in a place that you don't even necessarily know, if you can't run them yourself? Besides, as you know full well, it is FOSS software that is (mostly) free of charge. No one has ever pretended that the necessary hardware and ser
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