The European Commission fined Microsoft 280.5 million euros ($357.3 million) on Wednesday to punish its failure to comply with a landmark 2004 antitrust ruling.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Sure, Microsoft could pull out of EU, but by doing so, they would show other governments in the world that they can't be trusted.
It is true that the absense of MS products would be a bit annoying to say the least, but rest assure, most governments would find or create some loophole in their legislation to make it possible to legally continue use Microsoft software while converting to something else.
Allready there is a trend in governments of the world to considers using ODF as document format to make sure that they are in control of their own information structure. A move like this would strengthen that trend.
Once that happens, government contractors and possibly their subcontractors will need to use ODF capable software. That Software would probably be StarOffice or OpenOffice, meaning substantial loss to Microsoft.
Another problem would be hardware venders. No hardware vender will be prepared give up the European market. This would mean that all of a sudden we would see supported drivers for Linux from most hardware makers, and probably systems with preinstalled Linux for the Euoropean market.
The problem to Microsoft, is that if such drivers gets developed for Europe, they would be available in the rest of the world as well. This would mean that the hardware aspect of Microsoft lock in strategy would be broken.
You would also see a growing market for desktop software for MacOS-X and Linux. A move like this would turn Linux, from a relatively harmless competitor, into something really dangerous and Apple would benefit as well.
Another effect would probably be less willingness to buy all US products in Europe. This would weaken the world, and in particular the US economy. In that new economic environment Microsoft would find that they would have a harder time selling their products worldwide.
So, pulling out of Europe would most likely harm Microsoft much more than it would harm Europe.
Member since:
2005-11-14
Microsoft should just say fine, you want to be a**holes and steal our technology then we are pulling all Microsoft products out of Europe. I am not a big Microsoft fan but dang this is rediculous and without Microsoft the stupid EU would be up a creek without a paddle. Let's just sit back and watch them try to convert all their systems to Linux and watch the stuff hit the fan. The average users over there would go nuts. Apple applied the same pressure to the French when France tried to screw them out of their digital rights protection technology last month and it worked for the most part.