This article misses the forest for the trees. During the height of Microsoft's monopoly, consumers were very much limited in their choices. MS did everything they could to keep the likes of OS/2 and BeOS off of new PCs, and that means no one ran other OS's, so no one wrote apps for them. Had that not been the case, the PCs, phones, and tablets we use today would be very different. I daresay they'd be better, for having arrived at many current innovations sooner due to the more robust level of competition and potentially having more viable options in the market today.
Just because MS lost its monopoly on its own does not mean that we, as consumers, would not have benefitted--and would still be benefitting--from breaking up that monopoly when it was more dominant.
I'm not claiming it did. I'm saying that a very different PC desktop / laptop OS and software ecosystem back in the mid-nineties would have ripple effects on PCs, phones, and tablets today.
Yea, the entire MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco is one of my favorite topics. Why did it take ten years after Intel introduced the 386 before 32-bit programming became popular? And remember what MS did to kill DR-DOS? Guess what, OS/2 never depended on DOS!
Just because MS lost its monopoly on its own does not mean that we, as consumers, would not have benefitted--and would still be benefitting--from breaking up that monopoly when it was more dominant.