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Microsoft Wanted To Drop Mac Office To Hurt Apple

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the airing-the-dirty-laundry dept.

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.'"

3 of 479 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Email Communications by PsychicX · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
  2. Re:Nature of the beast.... by drsmithy · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Nature of the beast.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.