FWIW, looking just at your final paragraph (as I agree strongly with everything you said, but feel a need to note that it wasn't all a complete waste of time): Bill Gates was effectively forced out of his own company after nearly driving the company to destruction by provoking a judge with his arrogance, and the Microsoft that was left after this mess--notably run by Steve Balmer--had a very difficult time hiring strong talent or having any reasonable strategy for its offerings, and as such was no longer organizationally able to maintain some basic technologies that had become mired in the antitrust case (such as Internet Explorer, which was trivially disrupted by Chrome, and is now effectively gone).