Yikes... I remembered them being forced by the government to do stuff. I just read about the outcome again and it's so fucked up... Yeah you are right:

At the initial trial, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Microsoft's actions constituted unlawful monopolization under Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890,[2] but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit partially overturned that judgment.[1] The two parties later reached a settlement in which Microsoft agreed to modify some of its business practices.[3]

On November 1, 2001, the DOJ reached an agreement with Microsoft to settle the case. The proposed settlement required Microsoft to share its application programming interfaces with third-party companies and appoint a panel of three people who would have full access to Microsoft's systems, records, and source code for five years in order to ensure compliance.[30] However, the DOJ did not require Microsoft to change any of its code nor did it prevent Microsoft from tying other software with Windows in the future.

Microsoft's obligations under the settlement, as originally drafted, expired on November 12, 2007.[33] However, Microsoft later "agreed to consent to a two-year extension of part of the Final Judgments" dealing with communications protocol licensing, and stated that if the government later wished to extend those aspects of the settlement as far as 2012, it would not object. The government made clear that the extension was intended only to give the relevant part of the settlement "the opportunity to succeed for the period of time it was intended to cover", rather than being due to any "pattern of willful and systematic violations".[34]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Corp.

So yeah, they agreed to do some stuff temporarily, for the appearance that something was done. They should have been fined a LOT and also forced to allow uninstallation of IE WITHOUT A FUCKING EXPIRATION DATE

See my comment above. May be of help.