The Yank Tax

English settlers in America once grumbled about the taxes they paid to the King of England, but now the tides have reversed. A steady stream of Yank Tax flows into America.

When British schools use computers, they start by thinking about computers with a pre-paid Windows Licence for the classrooms, then fill the staffroom with Windows laptops, and administer the whole thing from Windows Servers using Microsoft's Active Directory. And hospitals, and rubbish collection, et c. et c.

Microsoft have disguised the tax with a change in words. They make sure you talk about 'Microsoft products', so people think that Microsoft produces something, as if its Office 365 tools worked like modern stationary, instead of thinking about it like a CD where you somehow pay for everyone who listens. But software is not a product, it is a bunch of computer-files, easily copied. The illusion grows as Microsoft lump pieces of real services into the mix, giving people disk space on Microsoft servers to store backups. Nobody thinks about the €20 per month per staff member as backup - they think of it as 'a whole lot, including backups'.

We can expand the argument of course. Hospitals, Google, Spain. A whole river of money goes into America, and nothing comes back on a boat. Nothing comes back through the internet either - we already have the software in the UK, and the backups. Everything exists on UK servers to it can travel faster.

The yanks made a plan: 'let's not call it code, call it "product" and they'll buy it'. And it's been working very well. Every year, we all pay a bit of the yank tax.