Has Gates ever come out and acknowledged that his actions at that time were wrong?
In retrospect it's kind of amazing that the government even took the actions they did there. It's hard to imagine today. The article touches on it, but the big companies seem to have wizened up to it. They don't need or want complete control, they just want control of their customers. Every once in awhile they'll send off a 1984-ish salvo against each other, but actually outright winning is too costly. It's way too productive to just screw over customers, and they all do it, because they can.
The discussion about Google and others at the end is interesting:
He understood completely what Microsoft was doing, and, as I like to say, there are only about eight plays in the monopolist’s playbook. He saw all of them. So that when he got market power [as the CEO of Google], he could execute those same kinds of exclusionary plays and he knew exactly what to do. He knew what worked for Microsoft and what didn’t. It’s a very, very parallel situation. … There are no coincidences here.
Unfortunately with government as it is in the US, it's probably not going to save us. It's going to take new, better companies to beat the current giants. Hopefully some of you are trying.
As an aside, this video of the Windows 95 launch is great. Ballmer is naturally acting like an idiot, but there's Gates in the background, so seemingly mild, but whom was in fact one of the most cutthroat businessmen in the world