Originally posted by Mooncatt The downside is unless the lawsuit basically puts them out of business (unlikely), they will continue to sell their products and the end consumer pays for the settlements via increased prices
So if your electricity company overcharged you (eg by mistake - it has happened to me several times, and no doubt to others) you would not claim your money back because they would increase the rate to make it up?
Microsoft is immensely rich. They do not need to increase prices to cover this, it is pocket money to them. That does not mean they will
not increase prices, they can do that any time, anyway, according to what they believe [most] people will stand for at the time. And software is peculiar in that the maker's costs bear no direct relationship to the amount they sell because each additional sale involves them in zero work except the admin cost of collecting the money. This is unlike a company making physical widgets.
As with many other software companies, Microsoft's real focus now is to get users onto rental. Then they don't need the effort to come up with something new to sell every couple of years, like in the Win 95/98/ME/XP days. They can just lean back and count the steady rent coming in, while a much smaller development team covers security updates and does the occasional cosmetic makeover. The beauty of it is that rental software is self-policing, no need for bailiffs, they can just stop it working or downgrade it with a signal from the mothership.