Pricing software differently for each country, does it make sense?

[G-Spot]

Hi fellows,
So, why not price the software differently in those countries? Even Microsoft does this here in Turkey, they sell Office at very low prices to students/teachers.

They sell the localized versions of their software, which aren't, for practical purposes, the same product as another country's localized version: they can have different prices without anybody feeling ripped off.
Would you buy Office in Russian at $10 less than the Turkish version? On a related note, do you choose between Mackintosh and Windows versions of software based on price?

Generous academic discounts are an unrelated policy that Microsoft offers all around the world, and they also don't make customers feel cheated: someone who doesn't qualify and doesn't want to cheat simply pays full price.

Do you think that would work? It's easy to detect the country based on IP address.

You would detect the country of a cheater's proxy, the random country of a customer that's traveling, and so on. I see a lot of customer support grief here.

There can be another layer of security check by calling the customer's phone number so that you make sure that they are really purchasing from their country

It's inconvenient, expensive and very irritating if the customer finds out why you are calling them. More customer goodwill goes down the drain.

BTW, we'll have academic pricing as well dont forget that For students/teachers/academics our price will be %50 off. We'll require proof of identity though, or the user's email address be from an .EDU domain address!

Academic pricing is good, but don't forget that you don't have Microsoft's concern with long-term addiction and lock-in of young users: discounted site licenses for classroom use in music courses (and an accompanying sales effort) might be better marketing than discounted private licenses. Some students are going to buy and/or recommend your products (mostly at full price) if they liked them at school.

Checking for domains in email is dumb: .edu is USA only, a less crude whitelist of university domains would be expensive, and any employee is likely to have an university email address.

[rectus_dominus]

I sense some overcomplicating in the force