Look at how Apple, and to a degree Google, are controlling/constraining mobile apps today and imagine that Microsoft had done that (x10... they were much worse

Look at how Apple, and to a degree Google, are controlling/constraining mobile apps today and imagine that Microsoft had done that (x10... they were much worse in their time) 20 years earlier on the desktop. They were pretty successful in choking off the growth of Netscape (the browser) and Java pre-DOJ action and would have likely used similar strategies against web companies (which were completely dependent on and at the mercy of the desktop OS back then) before they became large enough to be a competitive threat.