Seriously though. The problem isn't the taxes, that's just a fact of life. The problem is fixed pricing and the lack of competition between resellers/distributors and even products. Often there's only one reseller/distributor in a country and you can't buy from other countries: monopoly and no need to compete on pricing/service. BTW - that list of reseller's on e-on's website seems rather outdated. Try to find Vue on some of those German ones, and would you honestly buy from the Dutch reseller? And then there is no viable alternative to Vue (OK, in my opinion), so there's no competition between products either. If you want to edit photos, you can get Photoshop. Or get Paint Shop Pro at a fraction of the cost (or even other/cheaper/free alternatives) - and you can actually shop around for these products because there are many different resellers. Let's hope the next versions of Bryce and Terragen will be really good...