MS hit by a Whopper of a fine.

[weEvil]

Check this out:

The European Competition Commission has announced just how much cash it expects Microsoft to cough up. At €899 million ($2.2 billion) the charge isn't as high as it could've been, but the EC obviously intended for the penalty to have a bite. The fine in question is "entirely retrospective," meaning it applies to events and occurrences before October 22, 2007. Specifically, the fine penalizes Microsoft for setting what the ECC called an "unreasonable" royalty rate. From June 21, 2006 to October 21, 2007, Microsoft charged a 0.7 percent royalty rate for each developed product that made use of the company's interoperability protocols. After October 21, that rate was reduced to 0.4 percent.

Read more at Ars Technica

This doesn't make me feel pity for them after reading this nice little article about Vista DRM:

Executive Summary:

Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content”, typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Cost analysis of Vista DRM