Agreed. Pricing transparency in healthcare has been wonderful for pricing (see The Atlantic's Fallow's article).
My point was that pricing transparency is not a panacea. It seemed that some people were reacting as though pricing transparency is a magical salve.
AWS: In my experience, AWS pricing has been transparent and great and they generally take steps to keep you from foot-gunning yourself. This article discusses a case in which the author foot-guns himself using a predictable mechanism AWS can't really prevent. I'm unsure of what else AWS could do to protect him from himself... (Anyone can throw out simple solutions without understanding S3's implementation complexity: they could seriously throttle their own product! ... but that might be seriously complicated and might hamper the value of the product to others. Besides, if you buy a M1A1 tank, you should be very careful about using it: it could use tons of fuel... He bought an M1A1, left the keys on the dash and then was surprised when he found got a huge fuel bill...).
There are simpler mechanisms for communicating price fixing - like saying "we won't be beaten on price" - that don't need to mention the price at all.