Exactly , they weren't praising them for their monopolistic behavior

We were going to solve all the world's problems with file sharing via the internet. (Oh, to be young again...) Tech naiveté is perhaps a better description but it did exist, especially in San Francisco.

"During the late 1990s dot-com boom, when the speculative bubble gave rise to claims that an era of "permanent prosperity" had arrived, techno-utopianism flourished, typically among the small percentage of the population who were employees of Internet startups and/or owned large quantities of high-tech stocks. With the subsequent crash, many of these dot-com techno-utopians had to rein in some of their beliefs in the face of the clear return of traditional economic reality."

Regarding Microsoft, recall that Google's "Don't be evil" mantra was specifically about contrasting them with Microsoft. That is, the idea that Microsoft used all these dirty tricks to gain prominence (which they did, and which is well documented) but that Google was going to be different and was just going to win by having the better product. And I think most people were optimistic about this, and for 10-15ish years I think Google behaved this way until the demands of "forever growth" capitalism eventually took over.