The Partnership That Could Have Changed Everything

DesertBlade writes "Bloomberg is reporting that, at one point, Microsoft had considered an Apple/iPod partnership before it released its own MP3 player. Microsoft was apparently displeased with MP3 players partnerships they had already made, notably the Creative and Dell models. This information came from court documents introduced in an antitrust lawsuit from Iowa. From the article: 'Microsoft had been working with partners on music devices for at least a year before Apple introduced the iPod in 2001 and catapulted to a dominant position in the market. Microsoft and its partners failed to come up with compelling hardware and had difficulty getting software to properly connect music collections on computers with their devices.' If this Apple/Microsoft partnership was formed how would this have changed the Microsoft and Apple dynamics?"

Comments

Re:I know...

[BrainInAJar]

That's unfair, Linux is a fragile kernel as well.

Any other UNIX should only panic when flaky hardware is involved

Re:Bill Gates owns a lot of Apple

[aristotle-dude]

Bill Gates owns a majority stake of Apple shares. If that's not a partnership, I don't know what is! Do you have a source for that? If you are talking about the shares of Apple MSFT bought as part of the GUI patent settlement, they sold those shares long before the split.