Ah, it's the "Don't upset corporations or they will punish us with infinite price hikes" mantra.

If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!

€1 was just figure of speech. (Still, Governments pay for a ton of Microsoft products; Ms office, Windows, Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint licenses, SQL server licenses etc. etc. How much money do you think Ms makes from EU governments in one year? in 5 years?)

High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.

> High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.

High software prices generally hurt businesses more than individual taxpayers. The 1EUR fine would be a catastrophe for Microsoft's PR, however.

That kind of move would also push a non-trivial population to alternatives (however weak) like Google Docs.

>SQL server The rest I can understand but please tell me this isn't true

If they can raise their prices by x without harming their business, why haven't they done it already?

It harms them, but only in the long term. But if a company is fined, increasing prices is the easiest way to balance the numbers.

Microsoft already started hiking prices for some of the enterprise products, and for now they can afford this.

I disagree with this kind of reaction:

1. I don't think it's useless, when companies raise their price they loose customers so Microsoft will probably be more careful next time.

2. If it is useless in practice, we should change the law but surely not let them do what they want, just because it's useless.

So they fined a company which controls almost entire European Government infrastructure. Company screws up, gets fined, things will continue business as usual, Microsoft still can do whatever they want, at least in the medium term. What EU could do is to actively try to reduce their dependency to a single firm, they can check the future deals, look for alternatives. Then they can have an upper hand and then no companies would screw up a simple thing like this.

> What EU could do is to actively try to reduce their dependency to a single firm

Yeah well, fighting IE's monopole is trying to reduce dependecy to Microsoft.