[ok123456]

It made Microsoft sweat pretty good in the late-90s. They had to behave a little better, but not doing anything too anti-competitive, during a critical juncture of the internet's growth and adoption, while the anti-trust proceedings dragged on.

Just because there was no AT&T style divestiture at the end, doesn't mean there were no positive externalities.

[int_19h]

I think the biggest thing that came out of that anti-trust case is the publishing of specs for various file formats and protocols used by Microsoft software.

[indrora]

And the duplication of... about two dozen string routines, from what I've been able to find.

The actual rendering engine was left to Windows (and to anyone who was using it, like AOL), the shell was left to IE to continue wrapping around it, and a few more things.

[scarface74]

Not really

http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/lu-18.pdf

[int_19h]

This mostly talks about APIs, and only briefly mentions protocols.

I don't know about the specifics of what is legally required vs what the Microsoft legal team decided to do to avoid further scrutiny. But the fact is that there's a lot of docs that were published in the aftermath of that ruling:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/protocols/ms-pro...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/openspecs/data_portability...

[scarface74]

And because of that, a million flowers bloomed and now we have dozens of browsers engines and not one dominant player controlled by a large tech company…

[ok123456]

Without that pressure, they could have pursued a more aggressive strategy with IIS and server technologies. Outlook was only mildly annoying. They could have been much more aggressive there. Microsoft did and does a lot more than Windows and Internet Browsers.