Billy boy and his friends have done this to many many many people and companies.
I hope they get a little taste of their own medicine!
The hell with M$ and their bad practices.

Can you afford to risk your business on proprietary software that may be in violation of any number of patents?

Can you risk having all your computers shut down remotely while your single point of failure supplier is investigated or after they're found guilty?

Don't risk it!

Switch to free software like freeBSD or GNU+Linux today and rest easy.

A $500 Billion fine plus royalties for all sales should be a wake-up call to the criminals at Microsucks who continue to violate laws worldwide. Suspend all sales until Microsucks pays up.

Everybody knows that Microsoft with the help of their head lawyer, spearheaded copyright laws on software. Now it is found that they are, like many freelance programmers b4 that ended persecuted under their [Microsoft] enforced copyright viewpoints are having to face the very same laws.

I looked upon programming as a nice job but that was long ago. It's not feasible any more, because any work you would produce will have to be scrutinized by the law? A job like that would tantamount to a lottery for who gets to eat at the soup kitchen.

Maybe if companies are unable to buy Microsoft Word they will see that there are alternatives that are much better, in the end saving them money on Microsoft's over priced office suite.

I have been an OpenOffice.org user since 2004, and I am a bit of a fan of Word Perfect.

I think, however, there may be a slight possibility that Microsft will, at least temporarily, replace Word in Microsoft office with a feature-enhanced version of Works...

I can see it now... after implementing MS Works, and people using its format for a while then freaking out because Word doesn't know what the heck to do with a Works document (by default, there is an add-on, but the average user, in my experiences, is unaware of it).

i4i is just one of lots of other companys stepped on by the vole. But things are changing. First they tried to incorporate java, they lost. Then they lost the browser fight in EU recently. Now, they will face a stay in their second biggest source of revenue. Finally!
PS: Of course you can't sell office without Word, duh!!!

OK. I am not going to argue the merits of the case. I am not a lawyer. I will however point out what I consider to be a ridiculous statement on your part.

You say that MS Office and OS sales are roughly the same. You say that Word is "just one of several" components of the Office suite. I will concede both of those points. However, who buys a productivity suite with no Word processing functionality? Answer? Nobody. They can't realistically sell Office without Word. It is the backbone of the Office suite. Without it you can't even do a proper Mail Merge in Outlook. Hell, Outlook's default text editor is Word. So unable to sell Word = 50% of their sales being gone. Let me take 1/2 your salary away and see if you feel it is harmless.

Egan - you obviously must've earned your legal bona fides from watching Law and Order on the tele?

I loathe MSFT's anti-competitive practices as much as the next guy, but offering up such a one-sided, absurdly ignorant, "summary" of the case at bar is disingenuous in the very least... you've obviously been spending too much time with the likes of Charlie D.