&gt;Silverberg writes Gates didn&#x27;t engage the government and politicians early on because he believed the company was competing fairly and creating enough value for the customers. But that approach was a &quot;disaster,&quot; he writes, as it essentially made the US government and the EU to &quot;declare war on Microsoft.&quot;<p>This is bullcrap. Microsoft was the 800 pound gorilla and played as dirty as they could against smaller competitors using every inch of their monopoly power.<p>MS had OEM&#x27;s in their leach and they used blackmail and threats against them to keep them from preinstalling anything but MS sofware in PC&#x27;s.<p>Software startups in the PC-era were routinely shafted. If their product was good and MS wanted it, they had to sell to MS or MS would attack them and build competing product that was pre-installed. They also hired engineers from competing firms without requirement to work, copied the product and bled the competitor in the courtroom, hided necessary apis from competing products. MS made so much money they could afford to lose in court if it meant that competing product did not make it.<p>Government was the only instance big enough to stop dirty game MS played.