seem likely to crumble in the near future. So what's missing in Eichenwald's analysis? At the top of my list: nowhere in the article will you find any reference to "antitrust". I was in Silicon Valley during Microsoft's days of dominance, which peaked in the mid-to-late 1990s, a time when the company essentially controlled the PC business along with chipmaker Intel. The Windows operating system and Office software suite had little competition, and Microsoft leveraged its dominance in vicious ways, most visibly when it intertwined Internet Explorer with Windows and "persuaded" PC makers not to include the Netscape browser with the machines they sold. Investors and entrepreneurs were well aware that some areas of software were simply too dangerous -- due to Microsoft's "no prisoners" approach of the day -- to enter. After years of non-enforcement of competition policy, the Clinton administration finally woke up and charged Microsoft with serial violations of antitrust laws . A series of federal courts agreed, but in 2001, the newly installed Bush administration settled the case without any major penalties, such as a break-up of the company that many had favored. Here's what did matter: for the next decade -- the time in which a "consent decree" was in force -- Microsoft was constantly looking over its shoulder. Even though the company didn't have to worry during the Bush era about serious government interference, the federal courts had declared it to have abused its earlier monopoly; this made Microsoft much more vulnerable to potentially