With Microsoft pronounced guilty and its share price falling fast, US analysts were looking fairly desperately for the good side of the story. If the judgment was bad for Microsoft, surely it must be good for somebody.

Surely there must be companies whose shares would rise. Candidates were hard to find. Ultimately, some thought that Red Hat, VA Linux and other suppliers of Linux operating systems would benefit, but in stock market terms these tiny companies are already more overvalued than the dot.coms.

Even Linus Torvalds, the Finn who wrote Linux's small core, thinks the system is three years away from being competitive on desktop and, he reminds us, that is what he said three years ago.

So if there is no realistic competition - as Judge Jackson found - why is Microsoft running scared? Why have some analysts and journalists been suggesting Microsoft is doomed, the PC industry is doomed, and that the tech world is going to be taken over by network computers, high-powered games consoles, television set-top boxes, mobile phones or whatever else happens to be flavour of the month?

It is Microsoft's bad luck to be under attack just after it has beaten off one lot of competition and just before the next lot arrives.

Although Microsoft's Windows won the battle for the PC operating systems market, this was no foregone conclusion. There were half a dozen proprietary suppliers supplying their own hardware bundled with their own software, including the Acorn Archimedes, Apple Macintosh, Atari ST, Commodore Amiga, the NeXT cube and the Sinclair QL.

This is the sort of competition the US justice department seems to want, with lots of pointless duplication of effort and users getting locked in to single suppliers instead of being free to change between hardware brands.

There have also been many alternatives to Windows on PCs, including Digital Research's GEM (Graphical Environment Manager), Quarterdeck's DesQview and Be's BeOS.

The market had lots of choice, it made its choice and it is not the US government's job to try to roll back or rewrite history. It is especially not the US government's job to decide the course of software development by defining what belongs in an operating system, and what does not - unless it is also planning to throw out the copyright laws.

But the question remains: what can be done to control Microsoft while it has a monopoly, and while it struggles for survival against whatever the next generation of technology throws its way.

The US Department of Justice needs to think hard about that, because it seems to suppose that problems of conduct and pricing can be solved by making structural changes - to Microsoft or to the market or both.

From the consumer's point of view, it would be better advised to apply the existing laws that would increase competition.

For example, PC manufacturers and consumers would benefit from published standard prices for Windows, and Microsoft might even make more money out of it.

What is more, if people resort to blackmail and other threats, why not throw them into jail?