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

I AM SHOCKED!

[Supreme Dragon]

I never would have thought a company with such high integrity would want to do that.

Re:I can't imagine

[drinkypoo]

Two reasons. First, it's Office. I needed Office in school, so I used Office. Now that I don't need to do that kind of stuff on my laptop/home computer I wouldn't buy Office.

I'm sorry, but this level of handwaving won't fly here. "It's Office"? Whoopdeeshit. Name one thing it does that OO.o doesn't that will matter to the average user. Hello? Beuller? Beuller? There's no such thing.

I use OO.o every day, to interoperate with Word and Excel. So far I have had zero problems, except that copying and pasting from OO.o into Dreamweaver results in some spurious HTML crap for which I blame OO.o (a fucking DOCTYPE actually makes it in there!) but that's pretty minimal, frankly. And 99% of users will never do that, nor have the opportunity to because they don't own Dreamweaver.

Second, Office for Mac is really very nice.

Is it nice enough for the average user to pay for when they can get OO.o for free? If they actually knew about it, that is? The answer, of course, is no. Most people will never notice a difference, really, between two versions of Office, and one version of Office and a copy of OO.o.

Re:Nature of the beast....

[Frosty Piss]

did Microsoft consider dropping it merely because it wasn't generating enough revenue, or mostly because they wanted to hurt Apple.

So what? Is any company required to support their competitors? No...

Re:Nature of the beast....

[synthespian]

Microsoft's market share did not develop naturally. Everyone knows that. This story was but another chapter on how Microsoft is willing to play dirty to hurt the competition. For instace, during the mid-90s, they were hell-bent on breaking just about every standard they could. Hence Google's "don't be evil."