Absolutely nothing came of Microsoft bundling IE with Windows in the 90s in the US. There was never a day since IE came bundled with Windows that it wasn’t bundled with Windows . There was never s browser choice initiative - nothing.
Out of all of the anti trust allegations, bundling was the nothingburger. MS was forced to stop making OEMs pay for licenses for all of their PCs whether or not they came with Windows and they were forcing OEMs to not include Netscape, share APIS, and document file formats.
Microsoft Office (bundling) has been a thing since 1990 and today, every single major company bundles products together - Apple, Amazon (Prime), Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Salesforce (SFFC and Concur), etc.
Next up: no, “cable was not ad free when it was introduced”
The whole Windows/IE bundling fracas has to be looked at in the context of Microsoft not only having a lot of unsavory business practices--as did it's welded together at the hip partner Intel--but also it was seen in the eyes of a lot of people as on the way to utterly dominate computing once Unix got pushed out of the way.
Add in the dominance of Office and Microsoft's presumed dominance of mobile once that became ubiquitous and a lot of people were looking for any lever to use against the company. All this activity probably made Microsoft back off a bit in some areas and likely tarnished its aura of inevitability a bit--but it's not entirely clear that it made much difference in the end. (And there were certainly people at the time arguing that the Microsoft winning over all narrative was deeply flawed.
The nuance that you’re missing is that Microsoft was a monopoly found guilty of antitrust violations. Bundling has different consequence for them than non-monopolies or monopolies that that have not had antitrust convictions.
Yes, there was a version of Windows that did come unbundled, Windows N <level> that was targeted for EU users to comply with EU antitrust agreements. And there was a browser choice selection during OOTB configuration with the top 4 or 5 browsers in the marketplace.
Absolutely nothing came of Microsoft bundling IE with Windows in the 90s in the US. There was never a day since IE came bundled with Windows that it wasn’t bundled with Windows . There was never s browser choice initiative - nothing.
Out of all of the anti trust allegations, bundling was the nothingburger. MS was forced to stop making OEMs pay for licenses for all of their PCs whether or not they came with Windows and they were forcing OEMs to not include Netscape, share APIS, and document file formats.
Microsoft Office (bundling) has been a thing since 1990 and today, every single major company bundles products together - Apple, Amazon (Prime), Microsoft, Google, Adobe, Salesforce (SFFC and Concur), etc.
Next up: no, “cable was not ad free when it was introduced”