Will Apple and Microsoft Renew their Vows?

krugdm writes "Remember about five years ago when Apple announced their deal with Microsoft where Apple agreed to bundle IE with new Macs and drop a patent lawsuit, and the guys from Redmond were to continue to develop Office for the Mac as well as purchase $150 million in Apple stock? Well, that deal expires this summer. describing the love-hate relationship the two companies have had in the time since 1997 and wonders whether the pact will be renewed."

Comments

Apple has more leverage though

[gouldtj]

We'll see. Apple has alot more leverage in this deal now that it has been ruled that Microsoft is a monopoly. MS needs to have Office on Mac, otherwise they are only choosing one platform for their office suite. I don't think that they are going to port it to Linux anytime soon, but I could be supprised.

Re:Something will happen, that's for sure....

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, it's a pipe dream. Won't happen. But this is what I imagine...

Rumors are circulating wildly about the new Apple / Microsoft alliance leading up to MacWorld New York.

Steve Jobs comes on to the floor. He reminds people of the productive business relationship that Microsoft and Apple have had. The benefits that have been nurtured by the mutual cooperation for the past five years. He asks that the lights go down and they start to show the message that Bill Gates delivered five years ago.

After 30 seconds or so. A woman wearing red running shorts and carrying a sledgehammer comes storming through the crowd and hurls it up at the giant screen. Shattering things and leaving the crowd in shocked silence before erupting in massive noise.

Jobs goes on to announce that despite the working together, only one partner has grown as a result: Microsoft. He wants to end that.

He announces a three pronged attack:
1) Open Sourcing AppleWorks 7 to be the new free business app of choice on Windows, Linux, and Mac's that will kill reliance on MS Office.
2) A port of Mac OS X Server (not client) to be licensed to any WinTel maker at the same rates as MS Windows Server.
3) The start of an aggressive new ad campaign that really crucifies the Windows as being fundamentally insecure and poorly designed.

Wild fantasy. Nothing like this will happen, but that's what I imagine in my wildest dreams. :-)

Re:Here's hoping they don't.

[NutscrapeSucks]

"If they could just finish the JS and CSS support, OmniWeb could also make a great default browser."

I'm sorry, but that ain't going to happen any time soon. OminWeb has some great end-user features, but their HTML engine is essentially roughly at the Netscape 3.0 level. The _only_ thing it has going for it in the page rendering department is the Fuzzy Text. Considering it took Netscape, a much larger company, many years to develop a renderer that meets modern specs, I don't think we will see anything mindblowing out of Omni soon.

A much more interesting project is Chimera, which is a Mozilla fork to (really) support Aqua. Personally, I would have liked to see the smart folks at Omni get involved something like this under the NPL, but instead their shareware plans will probably be obliviated.

(And while all of these browsers are great, I doubt IE is going away anytime soon, because it's defaultness was pretty much the cornerstone of the Apple-MS deal.)