Microsoft didn't just "play hardball"; they abused a monopoly position to extinguish competition, and they lost multiple antitrust suits because of it. The fact that other companies are misbehaving now doesn't negate the damage MS did in the 1990s. OEMs couldn't refuse MS agreements because of MS's monopoly. To an extent the computing world has recovered, so if you weren't old enough or not yet into the computing industry you might not have noticed, but the market would be way more interesting without MS's anticompetitive bullying.
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Microsoft didn't just "play hardball"; they abused a monopoly position to extinguish competition, and they lost multiple antitrust suits because of it. The fact that other companies are misbehaving now doesn't negate the damage MS did in the 1990s. OEMs couldn't refuse MS agreements because of MS's monopoly. To an extent the computing world has recovered, so if you weren't old enough or not yet into the computing industry you might not have noticed, but the market would be way more interesting without MS's anticompetitive bullying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#Government...