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, as the world pays Microsoft, Google, Amazon, et c., just to run their own computers.

When British schools need computers, they start by purchasing 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 music CD where you somehow pay for everyone who listens to the music every time you play it through your own speakers. But software is not a product, it is a bunch of computer-files, easily copied, and easily executed. The illusion grows stronger as Microsoft lump pieces of real services into the mix, giving people disk space on Microsoft servers to store backups. Nobody thinks about spending €20 per month per staff member to backup a few files - they think of it as bundle of services (which includes backups).

Once we add in Google, Facebook, et c. into the picture, a hefty chunk of the UK's revenue goes straight to paying the Yank Tax. The same applies to much of the planet. A whole river of money goes into the USA, and we get nothing back but a little disk space, and even that mostly exists in the UK as data storage owned by Microsoft.

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, and every year we all pay a little more.