At the same time, it is also now evident that Microsoft's competitors, no less devious, predatory, and monopolistic themselves, played the Justice Department for a chump.
The single largest contribution that Mel made to Sirius XM was to sing and dance before Congress in a way that was sufficiently convincing as to get the FCC, the Justice Department and our elected officials on board with this monopolistic merger.
When the Justice Department (and later the courts) declared, in 1998, that Microsoft was guilty of monopolistic practices for bundling a free Internet Explorer with its operating system, in order to cripple a rival browser from Netscape, Mossberg wrote that a free browser better served consumers.