I was there as an employee. It absolutely had a chilling effect. Up until then Microsoft was aggressively finding ways to tie the browser closer to the OS and

I was there as an employee. It absolutely had a chilling effect. Up until then Microsoft was aggressively finding ways to tie the browser closer to the OS and make it more integrated. In IE4, they went so far as to rewire the OS shell to use IE in all its rendering. After IE6 it was clear the government was only going to punish the company for pursuing this. As commenter have suggested the market has since validated that Microsoft was probably on the right track, doing what was in the best interest of consumers. No one would buy an OS today that cannot browse the web out of the box. Furthermore, MS was lambasted for "forcing" OEMs to not bundle bloatware. Once they were prevented from doing this, PCs were packaged with all kinds of crap and you pretty much had to format them to get a decent experience. I left the company 5 years ago, partly out of frustration with the EU regulation. Our team was forced to spend hours documenting internal DB stored procedures so that some competitor could reverse engineer our product. Every year Microsoft donates thousands of man years of effort doing this crap that serves no purpose for Microsoft's customers.