Whilst I'd agree strongly that the courts exacted far less severe a penalty than they could have, or IMO should have, based on the Findings of Fact in the case,

Whilst I'd agree strongly that the courts exacted far less severe a penalty than they could have, or IMO should have, based on the Findings of Fact in the case, the point remains that Microsoft post trial was far less feared or effective than it had been previously. It was in 2007 that the founder of this site and its associated venture capital wrote "Microsoft is Dead": Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s. I can remember when it was IBM before them. I mostly ignored this shadow. I never used Microsoft software, so it only affected me indirectly—for example, in the spam I got from botnets. And because I wasn't paying attention, I didn't notice when the shadow disappeared. But it's gone now. I can sense that. No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make a lot of money—so does IBM, for that matter. But they're not dangerous. <http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9770> Of course, Microsoft did not in fact die, and it remains part of FAANG (or MAAMA, or whatever we're calling them these days), but the company did see a substantial decline by any number of measures (fear, market cap, reputation, market domination) through the aughts and well into the teens. Google and Facebook and Amazon emerged, Apple (all but dead itself by the late 1990s) had one of the most phenomenal come-backs of any company ever. And when we talk of market domination today, the first names off peoples lips or fingertips are more likely Google and Facebook and Amazon than Microsoft. It's their market spaces which are most resistant to serious rivalry, whilst Microsoft scrambles for the scraps of desktop and tries to establish itself in the Cloud. The areas it had tried to dominate: commerce, Web search, handhelds, and even office software, are owned, or at least strongly contested (in the last instance) by others. I'm not saying that Microsoft is redeemed (I don't think it is), or that it's well behaved (dittos). But the unrestrained malevolence it exhibited through the mid-1990s is mostly tamped down strongly.