A source close to IBM UK Ltd says that the company is so fed up with arbitrage over its products in different countries that it’s planning to introduce unified pricing across the world sounds painful given that Comdisco Inc reckons that premiums over the price in the US for mainframes range from 15% in Canada through 128% in Germany, 134% in France, 135% in Belgium to 162% in Japan: IBM itself was outraged – We already do have global pricing, it protested roundly; our New York colleagues thought that if IBM made the switch, it would create its own currency first; and Xephon Plc’s Jeff Hosier also thought IBM probably would introduce unified pricing – but with regional and national variations.
