IBM must be going through an extreme state of déjà vu today.

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) is investigating allegations that the IT giant abused its dominance of the mainframe business to squeeze rivals out of the market.

For the past decade or so, it’s been Microsoft facing the wrath of the competition authorities on both sides of the Atlantic, but for IBM it was a fact of life for 13 years until President Ronald Reagan’s administration in the early 1980s called off US government attempts to tackle Big Blue’s dominance.

The need to maintain competition in IT is of course paramount, but the after effects of these huge actions can be profound, and not always for the best.

In many ways, IBM still suffers from the cultural impact of the anti-trust case against it more than 20 years later.

Anyone dealing with the supplier still finds it a maze of Chinese walls and organisational siloes that often make it difficult to get a view of what IBM the company can do for you, as opposed to what a particular IBM product range can do.

Even IBM staff complain there is too little interaction between products groups, a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

This is a legacy of the days when IBM was utterly paranoid about being perceived as anti-competitive. The gist of the anti-trust lobby was that the company’s size and dominant influence in so many sectors of the industry in its late 1970s peak gave it undue advantage. So, for example, it was perceived that if you bought a mainframe from IBM, you were more likely to buy a mid-range server, or a software application, because IBM would wrap it all up into a deal that rivals could simply not match.

So IBM consciously created an organisational culture whereby each product group competed only against competitors in that same sector, to the extent that buying a whole new IT infrastructure (as IT departments would still do in those days) meant dealing with several different IBM salespeople, none of whom could act as if they all worked for the same company.

Even after the huge changes IBM has been through since the dark days of the early 1990s, when it made what was at the time the largest corporate loss in history, the influence of those anti-trust-induced days are still evident.

Microsoft, however, has made significant cultural changes after the mauling it has received from EU and US competition authorities.

The software giant has always been an aggressive sales and marketing organisation. It still is. But during the investigation into Microsoft’s tactics in bullying Netscape into submission in the browser market in the 1990s, there was plenty of evidence of this aggressiveness. Executives were found to have talked about crushing Netscape, and similarly bombastic talk. For a company with 95 per cent share of the PC operating system market, that was deemed anti-competitive.

In many ways, Microsoft was simply continuing the tactics it had employed when it was a young upstart. Go into an executive sales meeting at any successful IT supplier and you will hear similar language used – “Let’s crush the competition”; “Let’s blow them away”; “We’ll grind them into the dust”. That’s how aggressive salespeople talk.

Microsoft’s failure was to not realise that behaviour was no longer publicly acceptable when you become a dominant, industry-leading influence and not the agent of disruption changing the market.

Redmond is by no means a perfect organisation today, but it is certainly more aware of its responsibilities and has gone out of its way to appease the authorities and end its disputes with rivals, even if at heart it would rather not have had to.

The EU has forced Microsoft to agree it will ensure interoperability between Windows operating systems and rival applications – effectively giving Windows the legal status of a market in itself. This is a good and inevitable move.

But I still struggle to see the benefit of the endless dispute that has now been settled over the bundling of Internet Explorer (IE) into Windows.

When the case started – it seems like half a lifetime ago – it was clearly an attempt by the EU to set a precedent for the development of Windows-based applications. The EU view was that Windows is a market in itself – now acknowledged – and even Microsoft must compete on a level playing field in that market against other firms writing software to run on Windows. IE was meant to be the Trojan horse for the EU to force that through, and I have often wondered to what extent it was chosen because of the sensitivity over the browser market created after the Netscape case.

Now the IE situation has been resolved, if that was the EU’s objective it has singularly failed. All we have now is a botched solution whereby PC users – who simply want to switch their computer on first time and see it work (in much the way that Apple Macs with their bundled Safari browser do), will be forced to go through a stage of choosing which browser they want to use.

They don’t have to do this for security software – bundled in with Windows but also available from Symantec, Sophos, F-Secure and so on. They don’t have to do it for media players – also available from Apple, Real Player and so on – this in itself being the subject of another daft ruling that Microsoft had to sell a Windows Media Player-free version of Windows in Europe, which of course nobody bought.

And besides, Firefox has been doing very nicely anyway, building up a 24 per cent market share without any help from the authorities.

Then of course there was telecoms giant AT&T in the US – the only technology company forcibly split into its components parts, creating the “Baby Bells” of regional communications companies in 1982. What happened? Within about 25 years, most of those smaller companies had merged together and all became AT&T again.

I’m sure that Microsoft has looked at the lessons of history and tried to avoid a situation like that facing IBM where the hangover lasts for decades. The IE resolution affects nothing but IE – and the poor confused PC users who now have to go through another stage in the installation process.

So who’s next? You have to wonder how long it will be before Google comes under the authorities’ microscope. It seems a little obtuse that Microsoft’s search marketing deal with Yahoo seems to be coming under scrutiny, when all it has done is create a bigger rival to Google’s dominance.

But the beady eyes of the competition watchdogs have helped shape the modern IT industry, and undoubtedly will do so again.