My preference is a bit outside the mainstream, in that I don't agree that the trial should have happened in the first place. I've never seen Microsoft beat anyone in the marketplace who didn't deserve it. Like Google and Apple, they were lucky to have some of the least-competent competition in the history of business. When those competitors proved inept at defeating Microsoft in the marketplace, they went whining to the DoJ.

I believe that any other consumer-friendly OS, if exposed to the same critical scrutiny that Windows faced, would have fared just as badly in the quality and security areas where Windows has traditionally taken most of its bashing. Windows didn't win over OS/2, MacOS, and Linux because of any skulduggery on Bill Gates's part (and yes, I agree, there was plenty of legitimate skulduggery to accuse Microsoft of perpetrating.) It won because the others sucked even more.

Moreover, I believe that the network effects that arose from the dominance of Windows were far more beneficial than the sort of meaningless competition that prevailed in earlier personal computing eras, where everyone was selling proprietary hardware and OSes that were just different enough from everyone else's to make life annoying and expensive for independent developers. Modern mobile developers don't know how lucky they are that they only have to target two 800-pound gorillas.

So I disagreed strongly with the DoJ's antitrust efforts, and would have even without the involvement of figures like Judge Jackson whose legal talents would have been better spent adjudicating parking tickets. The whole process made me pretty cynical about antitrust actions and our legal system in general.