I don't think shareholders would endorse Microsoft giving up a market that accounts for 30+ percent of their annual revenues to escape a one-time fine that is only a fraction of those revenues.
Moving all their European R&D to other countries would cost M$ a fortune, interrupting the development of new products, while the loss of 10-15.000 jobs would not cause any significant disruption to the European labour market.
And if Microsoft did as you proposed, they would lose any means to enforce their Copyright in Europe, so former clients could keep on using their products - Support is mostly done by third parties anyway. In the long run however, many corporate clients would look for alternatives, pushing the development of alternatives to M$ products. Since nearly all relevant alternatives in the various segments today are open source, this would help to make open source alternatives better and more attractive to customers world-wide. And that's exactly what Microsoft doesn't want to happen.
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I don't think shareholders would endorse Microsoft giving up a market that accounts for 30+ percent of their annual revenues to escape a one-time fine that is only a fraction of those revenues. Moving all their European R&D to other countries would cost M$ a fortune, interrupting the development of new products, while the loss of 10-15.000 jobs would not cause any significant disruption to the European labour market.
And if Microsoft did as you proposed, they would lose any means to enforce their Copyright in Europe, so former clients could keep on using their products - Support is mostly done by third parties anyway. In the long run however, many corporate clients would look for alternatives, pushing the development of alternatives to M$ products. Since nearly all relevant alternatives in the various segments today are open source, this would help to make open source alternatives better and more attractive to customers world-wide. And that's exactly what Microsoft doesn't want to happen.