If the decree had been in place in the mid-1980s and the government had taken the formalist approach to the evolution of operating systems, it might very well have tried to prevent Microsoft from integrating a graphical user interface when it upgraded MS-DOS to Windows. At the time GUIs were available as utilities. It seems obvious, however, that Microsoft's ability to integrate a GUI into its operating system and to upgrade the GUI and operating system together has made personal computing more accessible and less intimidating to millions of consumers. The foregone benefits to consumers if the government was successful in stopping the integration of IE into Windows would probably be at least as significant.