Dumb Software Pricing

I see that IBM has decided to treat dual-core chips as one for software-pricing purposes. Pardon me for going all corporate here, but the whole thing is still moronic. I have this naïve notion that customers ought to pay a price that’s proportional to the value received. In the case of IT infrastructure, this might have to do with the number of people using it, or it might have to do with the size and importance of the business problem, but I guarantee it totally has nothing to do with the number of compute elements you’re running. Why do we let this craziness continue?