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Apple Joins BAPCo
DigitalDame2 writes to tell us Gearlog is reporting that Apple has joined up with Windows benchmarking consortium BAPCo as a full blown member. From the article: "This is significant because it means that Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing, and it will influence industry-standard testing methodologies going forward, possibly including Mac OS X testing."
Avie didn't lose any "internal battle". He stepped aside about three years ago, and picked Bertrand to succeed him. If I had a hundred million bucks like Avie, I probably would have left a long time ago.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
One way Apple has survived through the yars of Microsoft monopoly (besides obivously better software) is that it has able to make its system very interoperable (as much as possible) with Windows in terms of file formats and protocols. Apple has phased-out some of its own in favor of the widely used (and not necessarily better) ones.
The single biggest incompatibility has been applications, and the single biggest reason has been the fundamentally different processor. With that out of the way, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is seriously considering helping Windows apps run on OS X. Then it would have the best of both worlds - Unix-like (Darwin) codebase and Windows app compatibility.
So the fact that "Apple has now committed to Windows-based performance testing" is hardly surprising.
Office on mac usually comes out one year after a Windows release. That said, the Mac Business Unit usually throws in one or two new ideas which end up in the next Windows Office release.
MS sold their shares quite a while ago, and at quite a nice profit too!
MICROSOFT OWNS PART OF APPLE - On Aug. 6, 1997 Microsoft invested $150 million in Apple
Microsoft settled an antitrust lawsuit with Apple. Buying these shares was part of the agreement. They have long since sold them for a very good ROI (although not as good as if they still had them).
Microsoft continued support for MS Office on the mac was also part of settlement (although dropping it would have just started another successful anti-trust suit for Apple). That part of the settlement also expired, although MS has made a newer deal with Apple ensure they continue it for another four years.
As for the feature set of MS Office, releases are staggered so usually a few features are added to the mac version that don't make the Windows version (which typically is released a year earlier).
I'm sorry to burst your conspiracy theory bubble and all.