I've been mostly supportive of Microsoft in their current legal troubles. I mean, it's hard to imagine a monopoly without a barrier to entry (beyond labor). There just isn't any valid barrier to entry in the OS market (as is amply proven by the Linux successes).

And even if MS is a monopoly, they shouldn't have legal trouble unless they are harming consumers. Note, consumers. Not competitors. As a programmer, I can tell you that MS has provided a great deal of benefit to consumers not just by providing a decent product. The greatest benefit is that by providing a pax Microsoft, I can develop a product for the windows platform and be confident that 80% of my customers won't have trouble with it. Ever wonder why so much software is available for windows, but not so much for OS2, Linux, or Macintosh? It's because as a developer, you can reach the largest market by developing for the MS platform. You add significant cost for each OS you add to the mix. If there were an even mix of Operating Systems, my expenses would be huge. And the choices in the market would be correspondingly smaller.

Now, Microsoft isn't an honorable company. They keep pushing initiatives that are, at best, dubious. The latest one is a doozy. Basically, in order to combat piracy, they are refusing to ship discs with any new PCs you might order. So you buy the software without actually receiving the software. Not good.

When Microsoft does something disingenuous like this, they should be called on the carpet and forced to cough up.

But breaking them up just because their competitors complain seems a little precipitous to me.