I mean, if they halted operations, presumably permanently as they seem to imply, it shouldn't matter right? Since they intend to ditch all their assets and exit the market anyway, right?
Unless this whole thing was a marketing ploy for Western audiences and they plan to start right back up once people stop paying attention. Hmm...
...with a weaker bluff. It's childish, like the toothless sanctioning of Biden and Hilary Clinton. Or threatening international volunteers for the Ukrainians with legal action, while inviting Syrian mercenaries at the time. The noises coming out of the Kremlin have become farcical.
How is the government going to handle the use of public computers if Microsoft is getting out of Russia? I mean, I'm sure they already have a lot of pirated copies and old versions of Windows, as any (at least third world) country does, but at some point I don't see any option to either pirate every copy of Windows or start using Linux.
I know you can pirate it, I doubt a government will decide to launch a national scale campaign to pirate every machine with Windows, it would probably be easier to install Linux any way since you have a lot of older machines.