You'd have to think that if Microsoft hadn't been hit with the anti-trust baton, that they would have never tolerated a program like Firefox becoming as popular as it did, let alone Chrome, and that they would have been much more successful at keeping the web neutered or at least highly captive to whatever they let Internet Explorer define, and at that point how do you get things like Facebook and Google coming about and becoming as big as they did?
Imagine a world where IE6 never has to compete against Firefox because every version of Firefox is mysteriously "broken" by the latest windows update. "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for the late 90's early 2000s. I think that its a very realistic thing to think that anti-trust played a huge part in allowing the open web to flourish as it, even with MS fighting as hard as it could to stall it out with IE stagnation.
I think a large part of Googles initial success was that is had many users viciously defending them. I was not a super fan but did too when I was younger, configured hundreds of devices to use Google search and people stayed with it.
They became victim to the same corporate diseases that plague all public companies after a while.
Imagine a world where IE6 never has to compete against Firefox because every version of Firefox is mysteriously "broken" by the latest windows update. "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" for the late 90's early 2000s. I think that its a very realistic thing to think that anti-trust played a huge part in allowing the open web to flourish as it, even with MS fighting as hard as it could to stall it out with IE stagnation.