Microsoft's .NET Announcement Brilliant strategic move against the Justice Department . Many people have said that the Justice Department was fighting the last war in their focus on the browser wars.
Operating systems are history as the nexus to coordinate users' interactions with their computers.
The Network is the User Experience. The strategy is to stall for time in the law suit and milk the OS as much as possible while preparing for the day of divestiture. Since the late 1980s, hypertext theory has predicted the emergence of a navigation layer that would be the nexus of the user experience. Traditionally, we assumed that this would happen by integrating the browser with the operating system to create a unified interface for manipulating remote information and local files. It has always been silly to have some stuff treated specially because it happened to come in over a certain network.