Telecommunications will be to the coming century what oil and steel were to the last. The courts were right to stop Standard Oil and other monopolies back then, and they are right to stop Microsoft now. The trend toward corporate conglomeration is dangerous not only because of the limits on consumer choice, but because of corporate strategy of vertical integration, the same company controls not only the means of production, but the distribution and creative facets of it as well. It's dangerously close to what happened in the old command economies under communism. Only one entity controls the economy from the top down.
Software is only one aspect of telecommunications.
The media industry has shown frightening signs of slipping toward monopoly as well. By 1987, that number had fallen to 29. On the eve of 21st century, the number now stands at nine. Nine corporations who own virtually every newspaper, magazine, radio station, TV station, book publisher and movie studio in the country. Just nine CEOs who control nearly everything seen, heard or read.