In his 2001 book, "Pride Before the Fall: The Trials of Bill Gates and the End of the Microsoft Era," John Heilemann wrote: "We are already witnessing the end of Microsoft as we know it...with the dotcom boom, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft's position seems, if not tenuous, then increasingly peripheral. The real estate it controls, the PC desktop, remains the most valuable territory on the digital map. But, as everyone can see, with the rise of the Net, the universe of computing is expanding and exploding, while the desktop seems only to be shrinking in strategic importance." That may have constituted the biggest rush to judgment since the Chicago Daily Tribune declared Thomas Dewey the new U.S. president in 1948.

Squabbles and airy disputations about the exact import of the ballyhooed antitrust case--the so-called trial of the century--will doubtless continue for years. When U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ordered the breakup of Microsoft, the digi-punditry predicted a dire future for a soon-to-be corporate cripple. I generously scored it a draw, since the Redmondians finally agreed to cut out their goon tactics in return for the government ending its jihad.