when you're arbitrarily rejecting a price without any understanding of the cost to produce the product? You have no clue what it cost Microsoft to produce XP, so your rejection of the price has no basis in fact. That's simply nonsense apparently based on political rhetoric rather than sound economic principles. The fact is that the upgrade to the XP Home version will sell for about $99 retail, the same price as the Windows 95 upgrade sold for back in 1995. Do you still think that's excessive, and if so, what anal data store did you pull your belief from?

Thousands of Microsoft engineers have worked for years to produce XP. Hundreds to perhaps thousands more will be require to support the product. Good geeks don't come cheap. The labor costs alone are in the billions. Furthermore, you're not allowing for marketing costs or any other expenses. You're just supposing that the market will be half a billion people. It's true that many people may run XP over a period of a few years, but that doesn't mean that many copies will be sold. Many countries, China foremost among them, are known in the industry as "one copy" countries. That refers to the tendency of the country to buy one copy of a product then illegally mass produce it. Furthermore, many people won't upgrade their operating systems anytime soon. A lot of people run computers that don't have the power to run XP and many more are satisfied with their current OS. Microsoft will be luck to sell 20 million copies over the first year of production despite an investment of billions in the product. Many of the copies they will sell will be OEM license versions sold with new computers. Microsoft gives very steep discounts to OEMs,
just as any other business gives good discounts to their best customers.

As for Jerry Pournelle, he has been a computer columnist since the CP/M days of the last 1970s. He's very knowledgeable about the computer industry and it's history, and he used that knowledge to show how Judge Jackson's ruling was seriously flawed.