This isn't quite true. It was never disallowed for IE to be bundled.

There was a court case about it, and then they lost the case, and then Bush took over the White House and the DOJ just completely dropped the whole case, so MS was never punished nor made to unbundle IE.

IE is still bundled in Windows to this day.

Which demonstrates that the fear of Microsoft, and before that the fear of IBM, was unjustified.

Wrong. These companies held us back because of their size, and it took a lot for a competitor to come along and unseat them because of their market inertia. Generally, tech had to advance enough to make their dominance obsolete, instead of a better competitor being able to unseat them just by having a better product.

If this hadn't been the case, we'd be farther along now.

> These companies held us back because of their size

I don't see how, for example, Explorer being free held anyone back.

I guess you don't remember ActiveX, do you?

Yes, I do, I've even written ActiveX code. If you could be specific about your claims, I'm interested.

IE used ActiveX. Lots of websites back then used ActiveX because IE was "the standard". ActiveX was MS proprietary, so other browsers couldn't use it. This made many websites only usable on Windows.

Do I need to spell this out any more for you?

Anybody could write their own implementation of ActiveX. (Sun did, if I recall correctly.) It was little more than an API built on top of COM.

Besides, many other browsers are available on Windows. ActiveX failed in the marketplace.

Wrong. ActiveX ran binary code directly on the machine. You can't do that if you're not on a Windows platform. I suppose maybe you could have used ActiveX to run Sun binaries on a Sun platform, but how useful is that? Any website is only going to have Windows/x86 code, and will fail on a Sun or other platform.

And no, at the time, many other browsers were not available on Windows, as they had a tiny market share, largely due to how incompatible they were with sites.

ActiveX failed eventually because of the rise of Javascript, and also because ActiveX was a giant security nightmare.