Ah, it's the "Don't upset corporations or they will punish us with infinite price hikes" mantra.
If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!
€1 was just figure of speech. (Still, Governments pay for a ton of Microsoft products; Ms office, Windows, Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint licenses, SQL server licenses etc. etc. How much money do you think Ms makes from EU governments in one year? in 5 years?)
High software prices indeed harm tax payers. There is no win-win.
So they fined a company which controls almost entire European Government infrastructure. Company screws up, gets fined, things will continue business as usual, Microsoft still can do whatever they want, at least in the medium term. What EU could do is to actively try to reduce their dependency to a single firm, they can check the future deals, look for alternatives. Then they can have an upper hand and then no companies would screw up a simple thing like this.
If they raise the price by €1 and for the sake of argument we assume a net profit of 50%, they would have to sell 1.1 billion packages to recoup the fine (I don't think Microsoft has sold that many software products in their lifetime, but it's a fun little thought experiment). 1.1 billion Windows 8 licences at €280 a piece is €308 billion revenue of which the corporation taxes will flow back to the EU members. It's a win-win for our tax payers!