Let’s understand how MS was “taken to the cleaners” here:
After the suit they continued to sell their $150 product to 8 million paying customers (1.2 BILLION dollars worth of revenue if everybody bought 1 copy)
They got their browser as the default on Macs during the height of the browser wars, and remember Netscape was ahead in 97
And they got all that stock they later sold at a profit
You call that being taken to the cleaner?! They made at least 10 to 1 profit on that settlement possibly as much as 15 to 1, if that’s being taken to the cleaner where do I sign up.
They didn't sell Office to 8 million Mac users... from my experience, they may have had a 25% market penetration on Mac and many of those were using the previous version of Office. Remember, Apple was including a copy of ClarisWorks with every Performa Mac they sold.
Their crappy browser was most often replaced with Netscape as soon as the new buyers could switch... all you had to do was run Netscape once and it asked if you wanted to make it your default browser. Most did. IE was considered a joke by most Mac users. As soon as the 5 year agreement expired, Microsoft dropped support for IE on Mac... and Apple replaced it with Safari.
Microsoft had to pay a yearly license for the software patents that Apple owned. Apple got to use the Microsoft patents in perpetuity for nothing.
There was no 10 - 1 profit on the deal... The stock sale was a way for MS to have a way to recover its initial payment to Apple... that's why it was called a negotiation... an exchange of plusses for both sides... but Apple got the lion's share of plusses.