Gouging the European Customer

December 7, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Why Do We Pay Higher Prices Higher for the Same Downloaded Software?

I have for some time been considering buying ACDSee, photo management software recommended to me by Tony Boccaccio, whose opinion I trust in the matter (he’s a professional photographer). I tried it last year and liked it, but at the time $99 was more than I was willing to spend on that particular set of functions. Most of what I need I can accomplish with other software I already own, though admittedly not as gracefully.

ACDSee now has a new version out, and, since I’m on their mailing list (they put out a nice newsletter with photo tips etc.), I received an email asking me to try it. Previous experience shows that they would keep sending special offers during the trial period, and today I was almost moved to take advantage of one of these, until I noticed:

Buy Now
North America & Other Areas
39.99 usd

Buy Now
Europe
39,99 euro

Given that the current exchange rate is 1.34 dollars to the euro, as a resident of Europe I’d be paying 34% more for this software. Why should that be? Shipping costs are not a factor – this is a download-only purchase. Localization (translating the interface and instructions) also not a factor – I speak English.

ACD Systems is not the only culprit; it’s standard practice for software companies to charge more for their products in Europe than in North America, sometimes hundreds of dollars/euros more. I’ve tried several times to get companies to tell me why, but have never had any answer at all.

By the tone of its newsletters, ACD Systems is a friendly company, so I went to their website to look for someone of whom I could ask this question. Finally tracked down an email address for Larry Langs, Executive Vice President of Sales, Marketing, and Business Development.

I wrote Mr. Langs a polite email with my query, and got the following reply from his mail system:

“(llangs@acdsystems.com) 64.114.67.86 failed after I sent the message.
Remote host said: 500 Resend your message with the word notacdspam in the subject line or contact the recipient through alternate means. Your message appears to be unsolicited spam or your domain is blacklisted.”

So I tried again, this time putting “notacdspam” in the subject line as requested, and got exactly the same error message in reply.

So much for “contact us.” No hope of an answer to my question, and therefore no hope that I will purchase their software. As a last resort, I’ve tried replying to the latest newsletter they sent. If their newsletter team is on the ball, and their system works as it should, someone will actually read that reply and answer it, or at least forward it appropriately – as I used to do when I worked for Adaptec/Roxio.

However, I’m not holding my breath.

Dec 8, 2004

Wow, just shooting themselves in the feet all over. Having put up this page, I tried to inform them about it. Filled out a web-based form to send email to a Ms. Monisha Khanna, head of PR. Got the exact same error message as for Mr. Langs. Do they even know that their anti-spam system is turning away all email?

Happy Ending

Mar 15, 2005

Back in December, I wrote about my difficulties trying to get anyone at a software company to explain to me why their software should cost more in Europe than in the US. A few days after I published that article, because I am stubborn and irritable about such things, I wrote to ACD’s tech support about the saga. To my pleasant surprise, I got a reply within a few days, suggesting a workaround on their e-commerce site that might even have worked to get me the software at the US price. But I was busy, figured I had already spent enough time on this, and I wasn’t that desperate for the software at that moment.

The software in question was ACDSee, a digital photo management and editing tool. I tried several others, including the free Picasa software from Google. Abandoned that one in a hurry when I realized it offers no easy way to crop photos, which seems a very strange oversight – anyone but the most amateur photographer knows that you can often improve a picture by judicious cropping. ACDSee’s crop tool darkens the area outside the crop, so you can see better what you’re cropping to, and gives you an exact pixel measurement of the crop area as you adjust it: very useful when you’re cropping a picture to fit a particular spot on a web page.

Some six weeks after my original complaint, I had another pleasant surprise from ACD Systems: a nice email from the man in charge of their online store. He made the usual corporate noises about not being able to discuss the reasons for their pricing, but promised that my comments would be considered in future decisions. He was pleased that I had complimented ACDSee’s newsletter (to reiterate: probably the best company newsletters I’ve seen, including the ones I used to do myself), since he had originated that project. We had an email conversation about our respective experiences with newsletters and software pricing, which culminated in him giving me a copy of the software, free except that he wants my comments on it (I’m working on that).

So, a happy ending with ACDSystems, and I do strongly recommend ACDSee, the best tool I know of for digital photographers.

Italian culture

Italians Flying the Flag

December 4, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Italians are not much for patriotic displays. You rarely see Italy’s ‘Tricolore’ flag flying, except during World Cup soccer. During his first run for office ten years ago, Silvio Berlusconi brought to Italian politics the very American notion that ‘flag = patriotism = [my] political party’. Billboards for his Forza Italia party were swathed in red, white, and green. As owner of the popularÂ AC MilanÂ soccer team, he also managed to mix sport into his message: ‘Forza Italia’ (‘Let’s Go, Italy!’) sounds like a cheer for the Italian national team – no accident, of course.

As I recall it, that election coincided with a World Cup, or maybe it was a European championship. At any rate, between that and Berlusca, there were Tricolore flags everywhere. I asked my daughter, then three years old, if she knew what that flag meant. “Oh, yes,” she said brightly: “Those are the colors of Milan” – the football team!

photo: The Tricolore flying at the Vittorio Emmanuele monument in Rome.

India

When is a Mountain a Hill?

December 2, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

I suppose that what I see out my office window are technically Alps, but I can’t get used to calling them “mountains”. In Mussoorie, we lived at 7000 feet (2133 meters) and called that a “hillside.” Here in Lecco I live at 400 meters, and it’s supposed to be a mountain. The Alp on whose slopes we live, il Resegone, reaches a mere 1874 meters (6148 feet).

In reality, this nomenclature problem originates with the British, who founded Mussoorie and other towns in India and called them “hill stations.”

“To use the word ‘hill’ to refer to stations balanced precariously on the edges of ridges some six to eight thousand feet in elevation seems, on the face of it, a rather odd choice of terminology. It has been argued that the Himalayan stations seemed as though they were situated on little more than hills because they were set against the backdrop of the high country. But the universal adoption of the term ‘hill station’… also suggests an etymological effort to minimize the disturbing implications of the sublime… To speak of hill stations rather than mountain stations rhetorically scaled back the overwhelming force of the landscape.”
Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains

I also have trouble adjusting to the Alps visually. They’re much steeper than the Himalayas I grew up on, so they look (to me) taller and further away than they actually are. From my window (and in the photo above) I see the Medale, a sheer-sided mass of rock, and, to my Himalaya-formed perceptual habits, it should be very big and very far away. But it’s not far at all – Rossella’s school is practically at its foot, and from where I’m sitting I can see the windows of the houses on its lower slopes.

media

Product Placement

December 2, 2004 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

Amazon, always the pioneer, is experimenting with Amazon Theater, a series of short films freely available (including for download) on Amazon.com. I noticed these a few weeks ago, but didn’t get around to watching any til today, back for my nth Christmas-shopping visit, when Chris Noth caught my eye. Always happy to look at him, so let’s watch this film, “Tooth Fairy.” Hmm. Multi-racial family. How nice. How PC. Typical American movie house – huge, full of stuff. (Since I’ve been living in Italy, that’s something I notice. I was distracted during “Thelma & Louise,” thinking: “Why do they have so much junk in their house?”) But these people have a LOT of stuff, including a den with a drum kit and foosball table. A rich family, evidently. Pool, balcony full of hanging plants, and a security guard driving around at night.

Okay, cute little movie, nothing special, I didn’t laugh. Then the credits roll. “Director – somebody Scott. Starring – Chris Noth. Cast in order of appearance: Cookware – Calphalon Tri-Ply…” Huh? The other human actors are listed below the cookware, interspersed with t-shirts, kitchen stuff, and tools. Each product name is a link to the appropriate Amazon page where you can buy the item (Chris Noth is also a product).

Product placement is common in movies and TV shows with contemporary settings – part of the reason I like costume drama is that it gives me a break from the barrage of advertising. I suppose Amazon has merely taken the trend to its logical extreme, by giving the products equal billing with the actors. I wonder how the actors feel about that. At what stage in your career can you be assured of being listed above, say, a socket wrench?

As a small rebellion against the inescapability of advertising in modern life, I have started peeling the labels off shampoo bottles etc. as soon as I get them home. Now at least I can take a bath without the packages screaming at me. So if you have occasion to take a bath or shower at our house, you’ll have to read the backs of the bottles to determine which is the shampoo, liquid soap, bath foam, etc.

Dec 7, 2004

John Francini responds:

Part of the reason that places like Amazon, and advertisers in general, think they need to do this product-placement nonsense is very simple: the TV audience is becoming highly fragmented. 30 years ago in the US there were exactly three commercial TV networks, plus PBS. If people watched a program aired nationally, they watched it on one of those three networks. It was effectively a “captive” market for advertisers: they could reach tens of millions without breaking a sweat.

Now, as you know, it’s substantially different: my cable system has some 200+ channels, and the audience is fragmented in many different ways. There are very few programs in the US that pull the kinds of audiences that advertisers used to see regularly – the Superbowl, and maybe the late stages of the baseball playoffs and the World Series (which certainly did this year, with the Red Sox breaking the Curse.)

The audience is also getting much better at tuning out the noise of advertising. So, in this incessant battle, the advertisers are trying new tactics, such as product placement in shows, or producing shows themselves. (BMW, for example, has a highly successful miniseries that’s only available on the Net. It seems to be aimed straight down the middle of their target audience, and hits it dead on.)

And of course, in the typical American supermarket, packaged goods makers do their last bit of screaming at the customers, in the form of ever-more-splashy graphics and loud labels. Why? Because while all these brands are struggling to rise above the visual noise of a crowded marketplace, we’re tuning it all out.

In fact, until you brought it up, I hadn’t even thought about how loud some of the packaging is – I’d tuned it all out long ago. It seems marketers have been visually screaming at us for decades. One local Boston example: Fenway Park, where the Red Sox play, has the fabled Green Monster. Did you know that, as recently as 1947, the wall wasn’t green, but was off-white and covered with a dozen or more ads? And the highways and byways of American roads were far more littered with billboards than they are now? Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…