For Microsoft, absolutely nothing. The majority of the case was related to Windows coming with IE pre-installed, which it still does.
They've reached a settlement which was not even a slap on the wrist. They've agreed to share some APIs and have a couple of people in charge of ensuring compliance for some years. Nine states + DC objected the settlement claiming that it didn't go far enough, but the appeals court dismissed their objections.
In my view Microsoft antitrust is blown way out of proportions and didn't achieve absolutely anything concrete. One can claim that it discouraged similar behaviour in the next decade or so, but that's about it. As to why Microsoft is no longer considered a monopoly, I'm more of an opinion that it's Microsoft's internal decisions that did that, not anything antitrust-related.
What sector does Microsoft dominate these days? They actually are pretty good at competing.
Major units at Microsoft:
OS. This one is old, gone through anti trust stuff already. There's Mac / Linux.
Cloud. Azure is competing against AWS, GCP, everyone else.
Gaming. Xbox has Sony and Nintendo.
The strongest monopoly argument is still operating system/office, but even that Google is eroding away at office. The server market is dominated by *nix.
Microsoft do have enormous stockpiles of cash and are acquiring things and behaving similarly to the others. But their major monopoly has already been tested and their power is waning according to market share (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...).
I don’t see their power waning. Their control of Office and Windows lets them bundle things like Teams and OneDrive, which puts pressure on smaller companies like Slack (sold to Salesforce) and Dropbox, who have a harder time selling when MS is throwing in OneDrive for free if you’re already buying Windows/Office/Exchange/Azure/etc.
Let’s all shed a tear for the billionaire founders of slack and dropbox, if it wasn’t for Microsoft they’d have 10 billion each instead of 1-2 billion. Poor Drew, poor Stewart, the world has been cruel and unforgiving to them.
Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat rooms aren’t innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-billion dollar rewards?
> Have you considered that perhaps file storage and chat rooms aren’t innovative ideas that deserve massive multi-billion dollar rewards?
I made no claim regarding what ideas deserve what. Simply that Microsoft is not losing power, by showing the kind of effects it can have on other businesses.
You're forgetting a entire ecosystem: developers. Microsoft owns NPM Inc, GitHub and Linkedin, all but Linkedin focused on developers and both GitHub and NPM owns their respective markets (GitHub for source code management and NPM Inc for JavaScript distribution)
