Comment by throwawaykf
11 years ago
To be fair, Microsoft also created a browser that, for its time, is pretty widely accepted (even around here!) as being much better than the Netscape counterpart. So while they did throw their weight around, it's not clear that their browser dominance was purely because of their OS monopoly. There were many other ways that Microsoft was leveraging its monopoly which deserved antitrust scrutiny, but I think bundling a browser was the wrong thing to be prosecuted for.
I agree totally that IE 4 was a browser ahead of it's time, however Microsoft were shown to have needlesly integrated it into their OS and then told OEMs that their Windows licenses would be revoked if they sold PC with Navigator pre-installed. I'd say they were lucky not to be broken up!
The problem there was that Microsoft had already signed a consent decree with Janet Reno's DoJ which specifically allowed them to expand the OS but forbade them from tying.
However, Microsoft also rewrote IE into componentized form, so that components (eg the rendering engine) could be used by other applications, including third-party programs. This was considered a Good Thing at the time (it won the deal with AOL, for example) and made integration (as opposed to tying) a reasonable claim. This is, of course, independent of the way Microsoft handled the argument in court, which was very, very badly.
In sum, whatever Microsoft did was not independent of the actions of the US government, whose interference had extremely bad results for consumers. This includes the crapware explosion that resulted from the DoJ's removal of Microsoft's power over OEMs.