I'm aware that Microsoft and Google still have massive marketshare, but there's no way of knowing what the world would look like if that lawsuit hadn't happened. They technically lost in the legal court, but internally may have been congratulating themselves because the penalty was so small.

But they lost in the court of public opinion. "Everyone knows" that Microsoft's modus operandi is "Embrace, extend, extinguish" monopoly-building, that IE sucks, that their entire platform is anti-user...it's taken decades of brilliant work on VS Code, on the .NET stack, and in other open source efforts to partially convince some of the developer community that they're not entirely evil. And honestly, Microsoft's character in all of this is a big part of why I daily Firefox on a Linux laptop, and probably a big part of why tools like Firefox and Linux exist. A significant portion of Google's success may be due to people leaving Microsoft's IE (and Bing) and using Chrome instead!

Here, "Don't be evil" Google - already somewhat maligned by their Adsense tracking cookies, their gradual degradation of the Search experience, their habit of canceling beloved projects, their own embrace/extend/extinguish model with Chrome, and their other actions, could suffer a similar character impeachment in this antitrust trial.

It doesn't matter as much whether industry insiders knew what their behavior was, or whether they take a financial hit, or even whether they're found guilty - what matters most is what popular culture paints them to be.