All I can say is: Ah-hah. Ah-hah. The appeals court may have found that MS maintained its monopoly illegally, largely because it didn't provide sufficient evidence that it needed those contracts with PC makers to protect the proprietary elements of Windows. And they may be right (although I think the general rapacity of the software industry is enough). But it agreed with nothing else, and I think the author of this book has been more than vindicated against his critics.
Yes, he had access to top MS officials, and probably shares their views of things. But you don't need that to agree that Netscape did everything all wrong ... they walked out of the HTML 3 standards conference, made their browser as incompatible with IE as they could just because they were so afraid. Their entire business plan could be summed up as "Bill Gates must be incredibly dumb and tone-deaf, so we'll make all the noise we want about how we can make them irrelevant and they won't notice until it's too late. Oh, and if this somehow doesn't work, let's get the Justice Department to sue them."
Well, it tells you a lot about this strategy (as if you couldn't guess) that Netscape today is just another cog in the AOL Time Warner media machine. The author is particularly good at noting what has not been much noticed elsewhere ... how Netscape, especially in the infamous 1995 meeting, seemed to be working hand-in-glove with Justice to create the appearance of improper competition on Microsoft's part (Funny how, when Larry Ellison (and Bill Gates' biggest service to America is keeping that guy from taking his place, believe me) pays people to sniff through DC trash to find connections between MS and DC lobbying groups, the news is more about the latter aspect of the story than the former).
But the larger issue that this book doesn't get into is how the New Economy guys, all devout members of the Church of the Invisible Hand, were done in by their own economic beliefs working too well.
That basically went that MS would become, and remain, hidebound and lazy like all companies with little real competition (of course, many companies have said they competed against Microsoft, which comes as a real surprise to anyone who has used many of their products ... Linux especially). After all, hadn't IBM and Apple before MS? Our laissez-faire theory tells us so, that economics will trump all human ability ... right?
Well, no one ever thought to imagine that maybe a company that has achieved the kind of market dominance that MS has might just retain the competitive instincts that got it there (as plainly logical as that might be). You're going to have to wait a while for MS to get soft. The story is not that it was easy to win the web war or that MS shouldn't have been at risk of losing it in the force place. It was that they got into it at all. The market is supposed to reward supertankers that turn on a dime, isn't it? (In fact, I believe MS's problems may have come from it being too eager to compete sometimes, owing to Gates' oft-cited paranoia that somewhere out there are two guys in a garage building the future that he won't see coming until too late. But should he be penalized for not forgetting his own company's history?....
Along the way, it was hilarious at first but scary later on to see how standard business practices, and things that would be recognized as smart moves in any other business, were invariably transformed into flaws whenever MS did them. Add lots of features to your OS so a broad segment can find it useful? "Bloatware." Keep in mind your customers who are just casual end users? "Dumbing down the operating system?" (Reminds me of Dilbert: "Hey, you're one of those condescending Unix users!" "Here's a nickel, kid. Go buy yourself a better computer") The looniest was, and still is, Linux, dedicated to the principle that people who don't make money from what they do do a better job than people who do. (And this system is often pushed heavily by some of the most libertarian, pro-free enterprise types around! I still do not get it)
So, seven years after the Web became the Internet's killer app, Microsoft has won, and IMO deservedly so. Deal with it. If you weren't in their tent, you should just cash out, shake Bill Gates' hand like a good sport, recognize that they won because they just played a better game, go enjoy a nice retirement and stop wasting the public's time.