> Are you arguing that even now breaking up OS/Office would be a reasonable thing for the Justice department to pursue? That seems like a barely tenable position.
Breaking them up today is debatable and won't happen so it's not worth discussing. But they're still leveraging their monopoly in anti-competitive ways by for example porting Office to Android but not desktop Linux to protect the very lucrative business of selling Windows licenses to corporates. But that doesn't mean that breaking them up 20 years ago wasn't a good idea. I'm saying two things:
1. Had they been broken up back then we'd almost surely have a much better balanced tech industry by now. It has taken us 20 years to get even a reasonable set of tech consumer markets back up, and it's doubtful we'd have even that if even what little was in the settlement hadn't existed. The Internet Explorer mess would have been enough to stifle Google/Facebook/etc for a while longer. The extremely anti-competitive practices of forcing OEMs to always carry Windows on their hardware would have been enough to at least stifle mobile for a long time if not even to hand over a new monopoly in mobile to Microsoft.
2. Saying that the hard slog through these 20 years to recover from such a distorted market is proof that further actions weren't needed (like breaking up Microsoft) feels almost insulting to those of us that had to live through the impacts of Microsoft's actions in the market. The fact that you no longer consider them a monopoly because they've "only" been able to maintain intact their original monopolies is a hard fought win, and should not be taken as evidence that even more anti-trust remedies were not needed.
I'm not by this taking any position on breaking up Google/Facebook/Amazon. As far as I can tell none of those are even remotely close to the level of anti-trust violations Microsoft got up to.