Will Apple and Microsoft Renew their Vows?

krugdm writes "Remember about five years ago when Apple announced their deal with Microsoft where Apple agreed to bundle IE with new Macs and drop a patent lawsuit, and the guys from Redmond were to continue to develop Office for the Mac as well as purchase $150 million in Apple stock? Well, that deal expires this summer. describing the love-hate relationship the two companies have had in the time since 1997 and wonders whether the pact will be renewed."

The courts scare Microsoft

[Lewisham]

Although Microsoft like to pretend otherwise, the courts do scare them somewhat. The fact they "develop" for multiple platforms forms an important building block in their case, and in any subsequent (and inevitable) case.

MS will continue to develop, they just might not ink it.

Apple has more leverage though

[gouldtj]

We'll see. Apple has alot more leverage in this deal now that it has been ruled that Microsoft is a monopoly. MS needs to have Office on Mac, otherwise they are only choosing one platform for their office suite. I don't think that they are going to port it to Linux anytime soon, but I could be supprised.

Re:Something will happen, that's for sure....

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, it's a pipe dream. Won't happen. But this is what I imagine...

Rumors are circulating wildly about the new Apple / Microsoft alliance leading up to MacWorld New York.

Steve Jobs comes on to the floor. He reminds people of the productive business relationship that Microsoft and Apple have had. The benefits that have been nurtured by the mutual cooperation for the past five years. He asks that the lights go down and they start to show the message that Bill Gates delivered five years ago.

After 30 seconds or so. A woman wearing red running shorts and carrying a sledgehammer comes storming through the crowd and hurls it up at the giant screen. Shattering things and leaving the crowd in shocked silence before erupting in massive noise.

Jobs goes on to announce that despite the working together, only one partner has grown as a result: Microsoft. He wants to end that.

He announces a three pronged attack:
1) Open Sourcing AppleWorks 7 to be the new free business app of choice on Windows, Linux, and Mac's that will kill reliance on MS Office.
2) A port of Mac OS X Server (not client) to be licensed to any WinTel maker at the same rates as MS Windows Server.
3) The start of an aggressive new ad campaign that really crucifies the Windows as being fundamentally insecure and poorly designed.

Wild fantasy. Nothing like this will happen, but that's what I imagine in my wildest dreams. :-)

MSN Messenger

[cappadocius]

Another sign of trouble: MSN Messenger 2.1 has been shipping with Office v. X since November, but only version 2.0 is available for download.

Who actually still uses MSN messenger? Fire is far superior to any other messenger I have used before.

Re:Apple needs to wait for Outlook

[Anonymous Coward]

There are other (less evil) products that do all the neat stuff that an exchange server does with MUCH less risk of viral infection. Check out FuseMail... not only does it do all the cool stuff mentioned but it does it no matter what mail client you make it talk to AND is web based.

Also, I think MS Entourage is far better than Outlook. I think it talks to exchange servers too... I dunno though, I dont touch those evil things. :)

Re:Here's hoping they don't.

[90XDoubleSide]

As a long term strategy, it's in Apple's best interest to package software which will also run on Linux boxes.

Why? If you want people to shell out $ for your OS, you have to prove that it is better (for what they are doing) than the free alternative. I would be appalled if apple made Mozilla the default browser for OS X, since your bundled software is supposed to show off the OS. While Mozilla has the best rendering engine around (I always use it to test my web pages first, and then go into other browsers and see what won't work :), even with the recent enhancements to the interface, it has one of the worst attempts at an Aqua UI of any major app on the platform (including Java ones). Change that abomination at the top of my window to an NSToolbar, use Quartz for text, and clean up the default theme (circa Netscape Communicator) and we'd have a good default browser for OS X; if Apple had a sincere desire to do this, they could devote some engineers to working on the Mozilla project. It seems far more likely, however, that Apple would bundle OmniWeb, since they have already started bundling Omni apps with their new machines. If they could just finish the JS and CSS support, OmniWeb could also make a great default browser. Just dump that crap version of IE that hasn't been changed in over a year!