SAN FRANCISCO (CNN/Money) - Enough!

You knew from the nation's biggest newspapers Friday morning how relatively unimportant the federal judge's ruling on the Microsoft antitrust case would be later in the day.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal each devoted teensy-weensy articles to the expected diktat from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. Now that news judgment has been rewarded. The judge says the lion's share of everything Microsoft already worked out with the Bush Justice Department ages ago was correct. Time to move on.

Of course, Microsoft, the investor community and even most of the major combatants had already concluded the same. Yes, the biggest antitrust case of our era remains of interest. But now it's all over but the haggling over little details.

Note how nearly every former headline-grabber from this historic case is doing something else today. Joel Klein, who headed the Clinton Justice Department's antitrust efforts, has turned to trying to fix New York City's schools. David Boies, Klein's litigator, is representing Tyco these days. Microsoft's former top lawyer, Bill Neukom, is retired.

Oh, there are a couple guys still following this one closely: Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. You might remember them as the ones who said all that was needed was to focus on business and that the legal issues would work themselves out.

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Consider, as well, that while Gates & Ballmer were focused on business, guys like Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison and Jim Barksdale were yelping about Microsoft's transgressions. Today Barksdale, once of Netscape, is effectively is out of the game, McNealy's Sun Microsystems looks like it's on life support, and Oracle's Ellison is doing a lot of sailing.

There's a lesson there, though I'm not quite certain what it is. But as you ponder, here are a few other tidbits to mull: Microsoft's stock, adjusted for splits, is almost exactly where it was in mid-October 1998, when the antitrust trial began.

The Nasdaq composite, at around 1,700 when the trial began, is down about 20 percent today. Four years ago was a time of what seemed then like great turmoil in the markets. The Asian markets were in crisis, the IPO markets were just re-awakening, and there was great fear about what impact the Microsoft trial would have on the technology industry.

Today those all sound like much ado about nothing. Looking back, this trial reminds me of the cliché about March in cold-weather climates: In like a lion, out like a lamb.

Adam Lashinsky is a senior writer for Fortune magazine. Send e-mail to Adam at lashinskysbottomline@yahoo.com.

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