...and they (1) altered their behavior because they were in those court proceedings AND (2) lost only to open source competitors (Firefox, Apache, Linux, etc). MS had already declared that IE6 would be the last version of IE, and only revisted that after Firefox brought out tabs and hit a 1.0 version that managed to reach the unthinkable portion of 10% market share.

Had Firefox been coming from a company that could be bought, it wouldn't have remained available to hit that 10%, and MS would have retained their chokehold on everything, possibly until the iPhone became significant (that arose from Apple, which MS literally invested in to be able to argue they still had competition).

MS today is indeed a different beast - but I've never been convinced the antitrust suits were misplaced. The market of competition was _broken_ and consumers suffered. Even if breaking up MS wasn't required to eventually rebalance the market, that doesn't mean all the steps along the way did nothing.

>MS had already declared that IE6 would be the last version of IE

Never heard of this. Do you have a source?

I remember it distinctly from when it occurred...but I'm unable to find any news articles from the time (in my defense, i'm struggling to find any news articles from the time AT ALL - my google-fu grows weaker) - so while I remain personally confident, everyone else should consider this unproven allegations.

But a big reason they lost their top spot was due to the antitrust proceedings.

Thanks to antitrust, they weren't able to force (as much) their garbage IE and Bing. The market was able to confidently invest money in creating other browsers which created better products.