[link|http://salon.com/tech/col/leon/2003/06/02/unholy_alliance/index.html|This guy] seems to get it. (Salon article, Watch the ad if you don't have a subscription)

But the closer you look at the provisions of the agreement, the better it appears for Microsoft. As part of the deal, AOL is also receiving a license to Microsoft's Windows Media technology and is agreeing to cooperate on instant messaging and digital rights management services. These are all areas that Microsoft has, with good reason, targeted as crucial markets of the future. Microsoft has always wanted a piece of every online transaction: If it controls the Web browser, and the content distribution technology, and the digitial rights management software, well, $750 million suddenly seems like chump change if it means getting the largest media corporation and largest online service in the world to use your software. AOL, after all, was desperate to begin paying down its $23 billion in debt. Far from admitting guilt, it looks as though Microsoft took advantage of AOL's need for cash to establish another major beachhead for its products.

So, Microsoft wins, again. After doling out spare change from its $46 billion cash reserves to make sure that the one company with the resources and technology that could have been a threat to it no longer poses a challenge, Microsoft is exactly where it intended to be from the beginning -- ruling the roost, ensuring that its software is ubiquitous. Neither the federal government nor the world's biggest media corporation can stop it. Is there anyone else left?