And what right does the EU have to slap that fucking huge fine on it? The EU fucks me of so much it's unbelivable.
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.