You’ll be hard pressed to find any company, or dare I say any people, that truly obey the law because they feel it’s a “good thing”. If companies were interested in doing “good things” we wouldn’t need safety regulations or laws to protect workers rights. Companies would just abide by these values out of a sense of self-endowed morality. But this is the real world, and it just doesn’t work like that.

If you want to criticizes Microsoft for violation of some laws, so be it, but only pointing the finger at one company and then claiming that said violations have “doomed” that company is naive at best.

This does not detract from the fact that the more Microsoft presses it’s presently constituted legal rights; the more pressure there is to move away from it’s high priced and substandard monoculture. Microsoft has used the law as it has used other levers, only when it thinks it is in it’s interest. It is not as if Microsoft believes that upholding law is a good thing in it’s own right. Charging the businesses and making the costs as hidden as possible to the end user has only slowed down the inevitable.

Lawsuit or not, few will feel pressured to do anything at all. Even if the government decreed, “You must only use Free Software”, people here would ignore it and continue to use whatever they felt like. There are many, many laws here, but as one of my Chinese friends explained to me, “If we followed all the laws we’d never get anything done!”