EU slaps Microsoft with $1.35 billion fine

I's been a while coming, but it's good news not just for for all those Microsoft haters out there, but probably everyone else.

EU fines Microsoft record 899 mln euros - Yahoo! News UK

 

It's all shit in a storm drain what you look at figures like that, Microsoft probably makes that amount per minute.

 

That's not an insignificant amount of cash, even for Microsoft.

 

You're right, the only net info i could fine recons:

300 dollars per second.
18000 dollars per minute.
1080000 dollar per hour.
25920000 dollars per day.
9460800000 dollars per year.

 

wouldn't be so bad if their computers and various models wouldn't freeze up when you attempt to use them. Or blink. Or speed up at random.

 

BUT, in the meantime Microsoft has been defying antitrust regulations, theoretically upping their revenue considerably. While the profit couldn't be anywhere near the amount of the imposed fine, it's a long term move. Even if you have to take a loss, crushing competition effectively may be worth the hit. Plus, the loss will undoubtedly become a tax write off once Microsoft's lawyers are done with it. They'll need to amortize it over years, but the fine will go away, slowly.

 

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.

 

Great... squash Microsoft... it's bad enough trying to send a file to a Mac user... imagine 53 different operating systems... with noone agreeing on any standards. Open standards are nice in theory

I find this statement ironic

"The new interoperability question concerns Microsoft Office and the difficulty for documents from rival systems to interoperate with Word and other Office products."

Yeah, because all/any Mac proprietary files work wonders on Windows or Linux for that matter.

Seems like they are going after them because of their size, vs the actual morality of the case.

 

And OSX sells for only $129.... MICROSOFT TAKE NOTE!! $399 for the actual usuable operating system is NOT COOL!

 

And they knew'd they'd lose it. I've worked with Microsoft CFO/Treasury team in both an investment banking and capital markets capacity...
and these folks are genius with exposure... as they should be. Better than most small to medium sized countries (seriously, I kid you not). I'm sure they were ahead of the curve, for one, on Euro/dollar spot/forward rates... much less securitizing for this expected decision... stretch it, write on the books when/where needed. Curious what the EU is doing with the money... is it going to the alleged competition?

This is more about anti-monopoly vs. fair trade... come on Windows Media Player... who is losing out on that ... and how important is that? Multimedia players/codecs???? Like a competitor to Notepad suing... because basic text editors are bundled in the O/S... squashing out competition.

 

Much easier to create an OS that only has to work with 1/80th the number of 3rd party hardware (wait, is there any 3rd party Mac vendors anymore?) and software solutions. Mac software works so well, because it needn't be as extensible... an age old debate.. had Apple created and stuck with software way back, would it of worked as well on any platform???


Besides... Apple hardware is much more expensive... and without going into the economics... what isn't made up in software, is made up elsewhere. Apple's revenue model isn't centered around their software... they eat that cost up elsewhere. Last I checked... I can't pop Leopard onto my Sony Vaio....

 

"The Commission said in 2004 that Microsoft tied its Windows Media Player to Windows. Opera, maker of a Web browser, said Microsoft has done the same with Internet Explorer."

I mean, as an Opera user, it's annoying having to revert to Firefox to watch certain porn movies...but whoop dee freakin' doo.

 

And at the end of the day.. people will still choose microsoft.

 

Perhaps, but the operative word there being, choose.

 

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.