Political Penguin

Mrs Penguin will kill me as she told me to go to bed ages ago but maybe it’s the result of travelling, access to a broadband connection after over a fortnight or the fact it’s still bleeding freezing means I can’t sleep.
I noted in my last post before I went away that I’d be doing some writing. Well, to be frank I didn’t, this may have something to do with laziness or the keyboard of the laptop being a bit screwey after an encounter with a pint of coke (not me I might add). Either way, I did do a lot of thinking about various issues which I will be posting on but to start off I’ll just mention that the Penguin family spent Christmas and New Year in Germany. (I’ll elaborate on the reason some other time)
While I was there I did a bit of an investigation on comparative costs of goods in the shops. I’ll do another post on childrens toys in the next few days but this post will stick very much to techie related stuff.
In Germany there is a shop called MediaMarkt, which is pretty much your combined equivalent of Curry’s, HMV and PCWorld. They sell everything electrical, techie plus all the DVD’s and music stuff.
What caught my eye was the price of a copy of Microsoft Windows XP Professional. Now just to note, this is made by Microsoft in the US at the same place all the copies available in the UK are made. Germany, geographically is further away than the UK from it’s place of manufacture. It is also designed in the English language so presumably there was an additional cost to Microsoft in translating it all to make a specific product for the German market. German’s get paid more than us Brits so therefore there are additional costs to be added by hauliers and the firms selling the product. Germany also has higher VAT than the UK, currently 19%.
So can someone explain to me why the fuck I could pick a copy up for 160EUR in Germany and it costs a sodding quid shy of