[Prophasi]

"A few gems in the credibility department from CEO Steve Ballmer: 'We don’t have a monopoly. We have market share. There’s a difference.'"

For a financial magazine, lampooning this comment shows a surprising ignorance of economics. Even 100% marketshare (which Microsoft never had) isn't equivalent to a monopoly. They'd have to be the only supplier, usually the result of significant barriers to entry (most often cost or government intrusion on the market).

Windows competed with Unixes, OS/2, Linux, Mac OS, BeOS, and others. Likewise, IE had Netscape and (later) Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.

Windows had obvious usage advantages over its competitors; but feature-parity isn't something the market guarantees. Its competitors had advantages over Windows, too. In the end, all were available, each had pros and cons, and users freely chose Windows computers in far greater numbers than the alternatives.