[robpongi]

Well, personally, I see any judgement against Microsoft in any court of law as a home run for humanity. And, of course, I agree that the bundling decision may have seemed trivial, but you know for sure that Microsoft committed much, much worse acts of deception, anti-trust, intellectual copyright infringement, consumer and corporate fraud, racketeering, price fixing, and much, much more. Also, its well known that they have driven many smaller companies bankrupt by their illicit and illegal acts of non-disclosure, deception, and unfair trade practices etc. etc.

Well, IMHO, I really believe that both the US and European court judges wanted to nail them for any or all of the above, but it would have taken far too long and cost too much to wage a decades-long court war. So, instead, they just convicted Microsoft of all that they could within a reasonable amount of time and capital expenditure. And, for sure, you know Microsoft would have loved to have gone for the long haul as it would've ended up like IBM's thirty two (32) year anti-trust case and all charges against Miscrosoft would have eventually been dropped as technology would have advanced and all long-term cases' charges against them would have become irrelevant and also the government(s) would have eventually run out of legal fees budgets to keep their charges against Microsoft active in the courts.

And the US courts really wanted to nail Microsoft for IE, but they ended up dropping it as they knew it would have cost much more than they could afford. So, instead, the European Commission got them for what they could as fast as they could. And trivial or not, I'm glad they got convicted and I hope there are more serious charges brought against them in the future and they very well may be. We'll just have to wait and see.