Self-flammable hype

There has been a lot of discussions around a post on my Polish blog about prices of MacBook Pro in different countries in Europe, USA, Canada and Australia. Some other bloggers picked up the comparison and published on their own pages, even one of the Polish national magazines (Chip, owned by Vogel) did the same. For some period of time I noticed the digg/slashdot effect on my stats hiking way above the normal level on interest.

What I discovered going from one Apple Internet store to another was that MacBook Pro was the cheapest in Switzerland and the UK and the most expensive in Poland, country which in fact doesn't have own Apple store (which might be an answer for the price). The difference was rather staggering €500 between the cheapest and the most expensive store. For this kind of money you can buy a new Dell in USA.

The second discovery came just right after the first one, as I call it "self-flammable hype". People started to justify prices, picking up errors in creating the comparison while the others reacted with disbelief or saying "I will rather spend on a plane ticket than give a penny to local resellers". Some of highly emotional discussions went into details of what sales tax rates are in different states in USA. But what is the most important to me is that people started to talk how companies regulate their prices based on country of residence. Sometimes ignoring simple facts like salaries, demand or technology trends.

I think my next step would be asking my colleagues in pricing team in Microsoft how do they do that... Stay tuned.