Microsoft Wanted To Drop Mac Office To Hurt Apple

Overly Critical Guy writes to mention that more documents in the Iowa antitrust case have come out. This time, it's revealed that Microsoft considered dumping the Mac Office Suite entirely in a move to harm Apple. "The email complains at poor sales of Office, which it attributes to a lack of focus on making such sales among reps at that time. It describes dumping development of the product as: 'The strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately.' The document also confirms that Microsoft at the time saw Office for the Mac as a chance to test new features in the product before they appeared in Windows, 'because it is so much less critical to our business than Windows.'"

Comments

Re:I can't imagine

[AKAImBatman]

especially when they can download OpenOffice for free.

When you're on a Mac, you'll want to make it NeoOffice/J. :)

Re:I can't imagine

[claygGone]

Open Office is not natively supported without the use of X11. For most people this is a deal breaker. Most people I know who have Mac's don't have the skill's to install it. For them it is worth it to shell out the money for Office. I wish they did....but they don't.

Re:Nature of the beast....

[BWJones]

In many ways, MS has given Apple ten years to get its shit together from a MS perspective (ie. be a worthwhile platform for MS to support) but has this really happened?

The reality of that little ten year waiting period descended from MS being caught red-handed with their hand in the Quicktime cookie jar codebase. The outcome of that was that MS agreed to a public endorsement of the Macintosh platform, a $150 million dollar investment in Apple (non-voting stock), an agreement to continue producing Office for the Mac and to share certain codebases. It will be interesting to see what Apple got out of the codebase sharing agreement in the next month or two...

Re:Timeline 1997

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

What happened between June 27 and August 6?

MS settled the patent infringement lawsuit Apple was about to win and included in that bargain was a guarantee to continue Office for the Mac for several years, the purchase of non-voting stock, and Apple gaining perpetual rights to the Windows APIs of the time. Of course as this reveals the threat to cancel Office for the Mac was probably illegal in the first place, so they just opened themselves up to more litigation, but MS's modus operandi for a long time has been to blatantly break the law and worry about settling lawsuits long after the damage to the market has been done.

Re:Email Communications

[PsychicX]

The thing is, the e-mail doesn't say what the (quite obviously biased) macworld claims it says. That's the beauty of selective quoting. Reading the rest of the message gives a somewhat different perspective.

The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a tot of people at Microsoft. The threat to Cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bar9aining pointwe have, as doing so wil do a great deal of harm to Apple immedIately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously, and at least someone there seems to want to move forward (when I discussed the Issue wfth Jim Gable, an Apple marketing VPwho visited MS today, he seemed very cortcamed aboutgetting more details on our specificobjections to their latest proposal; also, we received mail today from Apple's evangelism group asking for details on the Office Early Mopter Program, saying that exec mgmt had instructed them to get these detaIls (participating in this program was one of the minor issues in the discussions)). Regardless of the outcome of these discussions, though, I believe weshould ship Mac Office 97 Furfhermore, I believe we need to decide this immediately - our indecision so far has caused quite a bit of harm, and this will become farworse very shortly, as we are not only close to shipping code externally, but need to finally start press and customer communications, especially with MacWorld a month away.

Later on in the email, we see some perspective on what exactly the "testing features" were:

Because Mac Office Is so much less critical to our business than windows, we have the flexibility to test out new things in the product and in its marketing before we try them~onWindows. Setup-less install, for example, is one thing we'll do on the Mac first.

The point being that the picture is more complicated. The full email describes in some detail why Mac Office should continue to be supported, despite its low profitability at the time. The linked Macworld article hides all of that and pretends that this was an attack on Apple. It wasn't. This is why you should always try to go to the original source, not someone else's agenda based report of it.

Re:I can't imagine

[dr.badass]

It had a fixed layout and grew from one end, so that the things at the top of the Dock always stayed put.

defaults write com.apple.dock pinning end
or
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning start

Re:Nature of the beast....

[drsmithy]

The reality of that little ten year waiting period descended from MS being caught red-handed with their hand in the Quicktime cookie jar codebase.

Of course, the frequently unreported facts accompanying this assertion is that said code actually came to Microsoft from Intel, after Intel acquired it from another company that had previously worked on porting Quicktime to Windows for Apple.

Re:Nature of the beast....

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be forgetting that for years before the settlement both Microsoft and Intel had been working together on Video for Windows.

Microsoft and Intel hooked up back in the days before QuickTime for Windows was released. Their goal was to make VfW the equal in performance to QuickTime on MacOS (MacOS was just called Macintosh System 7 back then). After QuickTime for Windows was released, this partnership changed it's focus, to one-up Apple's Windows product. They toiled away for years but were always one step behind.

Microsoft AND Intel then hired the third party that Apple had contracted the initial QuickTime for Windows development to. The third party still had access to all the code that they wrote for Apple. Microsoft AND Intel managers explicitly told the developer to reuse that code in their contracted update to Video for Windows. And the developer, seeing all the money being waved under it's nose, did just that.

This explicit direction to the third party is why Microsoft saw the writing on the wall in the QuickTime lawsuit and did such a public about-face.

Ultimately, Microsoft has made a profit, even given the "undisclosed" settlement that was paid to Apple at the same time (by all reasonable accounts this settlement extended to 7 figures). Microsoft bought Apple stock shortly before it skyrocketed in value, and sold it all off for over 20 times the price originally paid. Microsoft's Mac division has always turned a profit, even in the darkest days of the "shared code" nightmare known as Word 6, so they've made money simply selling their software too. Mac users are notoriously better about paying for their software than Windows users.

Does Apple sale for twice what Windows users pay?

[falconwolf]

Apple charges double for everything it sells.

Can you back up this statement? The last price comparison I saw between equivilently equiped Macs and Windows PCs Macs edged out Windows on a price/feature basis.

Falcon

Re:Does Apple sale for twice what Windows users pa

[10Ghz]

30GB Zune: $249.99
30GB iPod: $249

"Nearly double"? On what planet are you living on? And the Zune is bigger and it weights more (iPod: 4.8 ounces, Zune: 5.6 ounces).

Please give some real examples of this "nearly double" prices Apple asks for it's mp3-players. Go on, it shouldn't be that hard, right?