There's no question that the EU hates large US businesses and despite all that there is still no competition for Windows. Linux, on it's best day, represents 2% of the desktop computers. Had Microsoft left EU to Linux, the EU would be stuck 20 years back. Actually, I'm surprised that the EU countries didn't just adopt Linux by edict. "Everybody use Linux".
What would have happened had Microsoft pulled back is that the lawsuit would have been dropped or there would have been an uprising from the business world. There were too many businesses invested in Microsoft to have their platform of choice pulled out from under them. In fact, had Microsoft pulled out, how would the EU have collected the fine? What court had jurisdiction over a private US company?
In the end, Microsoft probably recovered the fine by raising the prices in the EU. So customers got to pay for something they didn't get. Outstanding! It's pretty clear that the fine didn't harm Microsoft.
It isn't the billion dollars, Microsoft could afford that out of the petty cash drawer. It's the principle of the thing. Never pay extortion!
I agree. That sounds about right, and perfectly reasonable.
I've heard about similar, unbelievably massive fines for companies like Google. But not really spent time, going into the details of it. Since there are many news items each day, and one has to be selective, about what you spend time looking into detail about, and what you just largely ignore.
Google, seem to be a basically good/sound business. Especially compared to companies like Microsoft, which seem to be way, way less friendly to its customers.
So I feel sorry for them getting the massive fines, from time to time. Which I don't really understand, as to how Google got handed all these fines.
Microsoft probably considered things such as your post, and the longer term picture, and decided to "eat" the fine (accept it).
As regards planet Earth (World), I'm disappointed that we haven't, as a massive population (world-wide). Developed a really good operating system, that everyone can benefit from.
There is win10, which doesn't really seem better than windows7 (it does have some benefits), in many respects, and seems to have all sorts of negatives, which windows7 didn't have.
There are various alternatives, such as various flavours of Linux (which I'm typing this on now!), and other things like openBSD, OSX, Android/Chrome etc etc.
But none of them, seem to be as good as, you can probably achieve on a modern PC these days. If this notional/hypothetical super-operating-system was ever created, on a world wide basis. (Or I'm day-dreaming too much!).
But in all fairness, Linux is not too bad at all. It is only really let down by certain sets of software (especially games), which don't run very well (or at all) on it and if you get into certain difficulties, it can be a really hard, uphill struggle to sort it out.
Whereas windows, with similar problems, would just have been a lot easier to sort out.