Only your friendly court-appointed regulator will know for sure. But three years is ample time to go from riches to rags. And some of the regulations would last for a full decade. Bill Gates' foes will rejoice in this government-engineered uncertainty, even if the public does not. But the sorcerer's corporate apprentices may regret their hubris in calling for the regulation of Microsoft.
Market concentration is common in information technology.
And for good reason. While software costs a lot to produce it costs little to distribute. And, typically, the more people who use a program the more valuable it becomes to other users. It could bother the trustbusters, though, who claim to know which monopolies are benign and which are anti-competitive. To date, the information industry has prospered in markets whose legal dimensions have largely been set by commercial and intellectual property law.