The end conclusion was "having a single superdominant proprietary browser is stupid." This probably extends to other communications software like productivity apps.

The only reason the Web exists as it does now is because of Firefox. Even with the ruling, Microsoft put IE into maintenance mode and disbanded the team once IE6 won. The only reason IE7 came about was because Netscape opened their source code, and eventually firefox started really gaining popularity. And that was only because it was a foundation and volunteers, not a proprietary business (otherwise it would have died like the others.)

So you can thank the Netscape and Mozilla folks that the modern web isn't still IE6 with the state of the art being the marquee tag, ActiveX, and VBSctipt/ancient JavaScript.

That's because the browser is a de-facto OS, which occurred only due to a sheer lack of actual OS market innovation - Debian had a package manager 20 years ago, Windows didn't until 2019. Browsers succeeded because apps ("websites") abstracted away the download/install process in a user friendly fashion.

That ruling's only fault was that it didn't go far enough in hammering Microsoft's anticompetitive "moat" practices.

Yeah, except the bundling wasn't the problem. It was that Microsoft was using their size to build a giant moat around IE. If you wanted modern features, it was all on IE and behind their proprietary scripting languages (vbscript, jscript, mshtml, activex controls)

This was all part of the anti-competitive embrace, extend, extinguish strategy that was so common at Microsoft then. They would offer a tool that was "close" to a popular standard (javascript, html), then extend it with their own tooling (jscript, mshtml), and finally they would replace those with a proprietary toolchain (vbscript, activex controls)

That meant the entire market moved to IE and it ate up almost all the market share overnight, even though it was a dumpster fire of a browser compared to the competition