Ah, so this happened in 2000 and the MS anti-trust ruling came down in 2001. That tracks. It was in the 90s that I really started to distance myself from MS as a small-time dev, and I haven’t looked back since. They were a notoriously evil monopoly that, while lacking any true innovation in their products, was very inventive at coming up with ways to screw over the competition, steal trade secrets, etc. They knew they could get away with it. We all did.

To give you an example, I had a friend who attended a developer conference and ran a booth where they were trying to sell software involving running mall directory consoles I think it was? Whatever. Well, rumour spread that the vendor Internet was running on a sandboxed subnet managed by the graphics research division at MS, and there was a lot of suspicious activity on that LAN. This was not long after it had become clear that MS had outright stolen disk compression tech from another company (Stacker?) and folded it into their own OS, so indie devs were super paranoid. The busiest booth quickly became that of a new company that had just come up with a security and full disk encryption package. They made a lot of on-the-spot sales just to fellow vendors!