Under these terms, it was suicide for OEMs to offer anything except “only Windows”. I was actually working for another company whose software was killed by Microsoft by a similar “or else” threat from Microsoft at the time.
Microsoft was a bully doing (likely) illegal things, except the FTC wasn’t doing its job.
(kind of like Dell does with their Linux lappies)
Also, some of the time Microsoft simply forbade dual booting as a condition for OEM licensing.
Was it just a strategic misstep for Be to not sue at the time, when it would have mattered? Why did the DOJ care about MS bundling a web browser w/ its OS but not care about MS preventing OEMs from selling any other OS than Windows? The seems wildly, clearly more anticompetitive to me!
And why does no one care about this stuff anymore? Not only does iOS bundle a browser, you cannot install any other browser (you can install alternative UI frontends for webkit, but you can’t ship your own js/html etc engine). Not too mention that they can veto any software on the platform for any reason...
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-Japan-make-their-own-brand-O...
?
OEMs had an option, yes they would had to pay more for licenses, but no one pointed them a gun, or did visits mafia style to forbid them to sell other systems.