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That lawsuit was overturned on appeal. The DOJ settled with Microsoft's offer to publish some APIs, instead of launching another trial.

The Java stuff wasn't even the craziest part. The whole thing from investigation to the appeal took the FTC and DOJ 11 years, where they were unable to kill of Microsoft's dominance of Internet Explorer through lawfare, but it only took Mozilla and later Google six years, nearly half that time, for an open-source web browsers to have more market share than Internet Explorer.

It turns out that a better product was all that was needed. It's too bad that the Mozilla Foundation has changed course and is now adamant that Firefox be as unusable as possible.

by ThrowawayB77 hours ago|

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Back when the word hacker still meant something, that was the opinion of most hackers. Microsoft being bad guys did not make early Java versions good.

[EDIT] I'd actually say MS losing the J# lawsuit was a net positive since it gave Hejlsberg the opportunity to create C#.

by croes6 hours ago|

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What does it matter if Java was good or bad? The point is Windows API didn’t win on merit but because MS attacked every competition

by bartread2 hours ago|

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That’s not really true: it just didn’t win on the merits you care about. But it did have other merits: backwards and forwards compatibility, excellent developer documentation, and no need for expensive workstation grade hardware.

I don’t disagree on the skullduggery, but it’s worth bearing in mind that Sun, Oracle, IBM, and all the other big vendors of that period engaged in similar skullduggery. Microsoft was simply better at it, had better timing/luck, and therefore more resources and reach to play those games.

But one of those companies was always destined to become a scumbag monopoly: if it hadn’t been Microsoft, it would have been one of the others.

And the war to kick them back into line through OSS would have played out similarly, I suspect.