Fault lines

Ben Hammersley makes an excellent point — thanks to the Internet, the shifting plate tectonics of currencies, normally invisible at ground level, are becoming blatantly evident. He notes that the US version of Typepad’s hosted blogging service “comes in at $4.95 a month. Fair enough: it’s a very nice system. But Typepad.fr .de .es and .nl all cost ‘4.95 a month for the same thing. That’s $6.57 at today’s exchange rate.”

Europe’s prices have always been higher than in the US (20-30% for electronics) and with VAT (25% for most items) the bite has been even worse.

No doubt agile US entrepreneurs will realize that price points in Europe are nearly double for some items and start to focus on electronic exports.