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In the last few months, Netflix has lost 800,000 subscribers and Redbox is being accused of "pulling a Netflix" due to price increases. From the whining about Redbox and Netflix online, you'd think that the companies were demanding customers' first-born children.

The reality is that both companies have been entirely reasonable about pricing. In the face of market forces out of their control, both companies have put forward reasonable price increases. The reaction online, unfortunately, has been entirely out of proportion with the reality. People need to stop whining and do a little research before they lay all the blame on Netflix and Redbox.

Amazon has added two new EC2 reserved instances, so that users now have the choice of four pricing models for EC2 instances. Seven, if you count choosing between one-year and three-year terms.

A quick refresher might be in order. Amazon started with a single price for its EC2 instances, then added reserved instances in 2009. The reserved instances give you a break on instance pricing in exchange for an up-front fee per-instance.

In the last few months, Netflix has lost 800,000 subscribers and Redbox is being accused of "pulling a Netflix" due to price increases. From the whining about Redbox and Netflix online, you'd think that the companies were demanding customers' first-born children.

The reality is that both companies have been entirely reasonable about pricing. In the face of market forces out of their control, both companies have put forward reasonable price increases. The reaction online, unfortunately, has been entirely out of proportion with the reality. People need to stop whining and do a little research before they lay all the blame on Netflix and Redbox.

Earlier this month VMware announced a new pricing scheme for vSphere that immediately raised the ire of many customers. VMware has now revised its pricing scheme again, this time increasing the per-license entitlement for vRAM, which should help customers affected by the earlier change contain costs.

VMware shifted the basis of pricing from CPU cores to vRAM, which some customers expected would triple costs even though VMware claimed it would simplify and reduce costs. One commenter in the VMware forums wrote "You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor."

One of the issues brought to mind by VMware's new pricing scheme is how important price actually is in enterprise software pricing. For SMBs, pricing can make a break a deal. But for large enterprise, it's not as clear-cut. In some cases, as Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group has pointed out, buyers may actually prefer a higher price because they need to justify their budgets (that's oversimplifying things, but there you have it). Also, too low a price may suggest to enterprise buyers that a product isn't enterprise-class.

What do you think?

Multiple outlets are reporting shifts in pricing in Apple's International App Stores, in order to adjust prices to reflect changes in the U.S. dollar. In some markets, prices went up, while in others, prices went down. For example, a $0.99 application in the U.S. is now £0.69, when previously, it was £0.59. Meanwhile, a Japanese app that was 115 Yen is now 85 Yen.

Businesses can get almost anything they need "as a service" these days. Platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS), mobility as a service (MaaS). A company called Black Locus out of Carnegie Mellon University has developed a service for automated pricing optimization and revenue management solutions for online retailrs. They are calling it pricing as a service (PraaS?).

BlackLocus is attempting to deploy advanced machine learning and revenue management techniques in a cloud-based service that would give small and medium businesses the same types pricing knowledge and advantages that industry leaders like Amazon deploy. Competitive product pricing for long-tail merchants online is a difficult goal to accomplish. Black Locus attempts to take the guesswork out of the process.

An advertisement from Best Buy appears to show the highly anticipated Google Android 3.0-based tablet, the Motorola Xoom, with a starting price of $799.99 - or $300 more than the least expensive iPad on the market today. What's worse, the ad also says that it requires the purchase of a data plan through Verizon Wireless, even for those who want to just use the Wi-Fi connection on the Xoom.

Does this decidedly uncompetitive price point spell doom for one of the most popular gadgets from this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011)? Did the Xoom just go from great Android tablet hope to also-ran?

According to analytics firm Distimo's latest report, prices for Windows Phone 7 applications are much lower than those for Microsoft's previous mobile operating system, Windows Mobile - in fact, WP7 apps are the cheapest of all the major application stores, with an average price of $1.95. That's more in line with the other app stores' prices, says Distimo.

And when it comes to the most popular paid applications, WP7 is right on track here, too. 57% of the 100 most popular applications are below $2.00. In other stores, this is between 51% and 67%, except for Windows Mobile, where just 37% of the top 100 were priced under $2.00.

Verizon is considering adjusting its data plan pricing as it prepares to launch its next-generation 4G wireless network. Not only will the network price data plans based on the amount of data consumed, it may also price data plans based on the speed of the connection itself.

"If you want to pay for less speed, you'll pay for less speed and consume more, or you can pay for high speed and consume less," Verizon CFO Fran Shammo told The Wall Street Journal in an interview, explaining the possibilities offered by the new pricing.