EU slaps Microsoft with $1.35 billion fine

This anti-trust suit will go the same way the US Anti-trust against Microsoft went about 08 years ago

The same right Microsoft (or any near monopoly) has to abuse its position, perhaps.

No, wait...

It hasn't abused it's postion though.

"Microsoft has now been fined a total of 1.68 billion euros by the EU for abusing its 95 percent dominance of PC operating systems through Windows."

*Sigh*

The size of the fine sounds staggering, so I'm crunching some hard numbers here:

A 2003 Newsweek article assessed the number of personal computers per capita in several nations; based on their figures, I'm estimating that across the entire European Union, there are about 300 computers per 1000 people.

Based on a EU population of 500 million people, these figures combine to form an estimate of approximately 150 million computers in Europe. (This figure may be low, since the number of computers per capita has probably increased since 2003.)

According to the Reuters article cited in the original post in the thread, Microsoft has a 95% market share in Europe; which means there are about 142,500,000 computers in Europe running some form of Windows.

According to this article, as many as 37% of those installations may be pirated/unlicensed users. That still leaves 89,775,000 paid-for Windows licenses in the European Union. (In fairness, even a user running a pirated copy of Windows is part of their market share for other products -- a small number of people, for example, paid for Office to run on their pirated copy of Windows, so Microsoft makes some money off of pirated installations. I'm not including any of this market share in my calculations, though.)

The total fine of $1.35 billion comes to $15 per licensed Windows installation. The fine is "fucking huge" only in aggregate; on a per-machine basis, it's really quite mild.

It's much less than that if your figures for households and computers is correct. Just about every white collar worker has a licensed copy too. Then you have to figure the really big ticket items, servers and it's software licensing. I think a copy of SQL Server 2005 Enterprise alone is $ 25K. Some companies have rooms full of 1u server farms with single,dual and quad-core multi-cpu configurations that are morphing into quad-core and multi-cpu blade centers to get that density for computing power up.

"http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.tss?thread_id=32089"

That's true. I was deliberately being cautious in my estimates based on information that I could google quickly.

In any case, frizzle's suggestion that the fine is abusively high isn't supported by the numbers. Grandmothers being sued by the RIAA for downloading Tupac MP3s end up paying more per copy to settle.

No doubt, but you also know how that goes, MS gets sued, they ramp the formula up for what the price is for each version and justify it with lawsuits and the like.

The alternative is going back to the 80's and early 90's with everyone having a slightly different product using a more standardized file format. It actually works out better this way, MS people pay for it, Apple people pay for it too and Linux, is simply free across the board, OS and Applications. I use Linux at home and have found I don't really need Windows. There are things I still can't do/have with Linux, but by and large, I've gotten over it and realized, it would be nice, but I'm really not missing out on much either way.

I still have Windows XP for work related things, but Vista, to run it the way I'd prefer it would take new hardware. The computers I have are plenty powerful enough and chasing hardware is expensive, not to mention time consuming to build and setup. Someday, I'll have to eat a new system and software, but for now, I'll keep my money.

Nope. I choose LINUX!!
FREE, easy, and is superior to all others. Doesn't crash!!
You can even make Linux run other companies' software.

On a similar note, MS is reducing the price of retail Vista:

"http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080229/D8V416EO1.html"

But a lot of those arguments apply to OS X and Linux too. That is the OS has features that doesn't run on older hardware and if it does/is supported the speed at which it operates is considerably effected. Sometimes consumers astonish me. The internet has a wealth of information and reviews and Vista issues were no secret before it was introduced. One could even use a demo installation to try it out.