Its stupid to sue when you have open office around.

yea... I'm not exactly sure why microsoft is paying this fine. Their next biggest competitor(OpenOffice) gives the product away for free. The retailers were the ones to gain with an "unfair" advantage in pricing.

So basically, Microsoft offered to sell their product for a specific price, and people voluntarily chose to purchase it for that price. That is being considered criminal. At the same time, people with guns make me pay taxes to support programs that I don't care about, and that is considered virtuous. What sort of morally vacant people are coming up with these rules?

The people that were ripped off will never see a dime of that money.

And this comes from the high and mighty company that so self-righteously and hypocritically makes criminals out of average citizens with their dogma about moral legal obligations. Check out that they also lost another case worth even more. What a bunch of criminals. We should sue their 11 year old children hundreds of thousands of dollars for this and also their dead grandparents. I guess when you are buying the politicians off through lobbyists, you can make up the laws as you go. Fortunately, the judicial system is not a part of the legislative system.

Sadly, OpenOffice is not ready for Prime-Time, mostly because everyone still uses the proprietary Office .doc format. Hopefully the move to open standards will fix the compatability issues, and OpenOffice will gain a better foothold. Nothing pisses me off more than opening a .doc in OpenOffice that doesn't render properly because someone used some feature in Office no one else even knows about.

That said, it doesn't matter what you're selling, you can't conspire to fix the price. Microsoft could sell donuts, it wouldn't matter, they still couldn't fix the price with a retail chain. Manufacturers put MSRP values on products, but the retail outlet gets to decide how much to charge (and in theory, that price is driven by what consumers are willing to pay, in theory).

Sigh, everybody hates MS, not without good reason, but what would happen if they went bankrupt in a month...? God, I would never use a computer again, apple would probably be the head OS company....

This is so retarded, people are getting a almost racist hate of microsoft...

But yet... guess who made half the programs you run...

[/rant]

(Oh and I don't LIKE microsoft, but they are a hell of a lot better than the alternatives..)

It's good to see that the EU continues to generate new revenue streams in this challenging economic time. As apparently they can't tax their people anymore then they already do, going after large corporations seems to be a 'good' alternative.

Sell something at too high a price? Price gounging/monopoly! Sell it too low? Anti-competitive! Give rebates to retailers for large volumes? How dare you screw consumers by allowing retailers to lower costs and lower prices! I think the EU gov't should just publish what they consider acceptable pricing to be, what acceptable features are, and what acceptable annual revenues should be. Let's stop this charade and just get to the central planning already!

Let me see if I have straight... a supplier can talk with a vendor, but they cannot discuss the price at which a vendor is going to sell it at??? Regardless of if it is MS or not that is assinine.

The European Union is trying really hard to replace a Microsoft Monopoly with a different unix iteration monopoly.

What price competition? Microsoft's only real competition to Microsoft Office is free, ha.

so... microsoft got fined when they sell their software cheaply. they get hate mail when it gets expansive. anyone got a better suggestion?

price fixing what aload of s--t, of allt eh "work" related program packages offered by companies MS office is one of teh cheaper ones , why havent these guys gone after autodesk or adobe ??? shit auto cad and 3ds max price goes up 100-200 dollars ever freaking version , last i checked retail on auto cad is around 7000 US dollars and 3ds max is at 3,700 US dollars. Adobe CS verison alost go up a little every year last i cehcked retail on CS 3/4 was around 600-700 us dollars. if any one needs to be hit in the nads over pricing it is these guys

@demonhorde665

Want to talk expensive? IBM Rational Suite, which is a set of software for developers that is analogous to AutoCad for designers, costs over $15,000 --- per person. And that's in addition to the costs of the server software that backs the $15,000 client software.

$12m... lol they make that every second.