Microsoft Wanted To Drop Mac Office To Hurt Apple 479
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.'"
Re:I can't imagine (Score:5, Informative)
When you're on a Mac, you'll want to make it NeoOffice/J [neooffice.org].
Re:I can't imagine (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Nature of the beast.... (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. 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 (Score:5, Informative)
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:That's why kids... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Email Communications (Score:5, Informative)
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.
While the DoJ is sleeping ... (Score:2, Informative)
- Discontinued Outlook and no MAPI support on Entourage
- Discontinued IE support (not a huge problem since Safari)
- Discontinued Windows Media Player and no DRM support for WMV and WMA (Flip4Mac doesn't do DRM)
- Limited support of MSN Messenger
- Allowed to purchase Virtual PC from Connectix, stalling G5 support, then killed it
- Finally crippling Office 2008 by removing VBA
- Bought Bungie Studios before the release of Halo. Stalled Mac release for number of years. Crippling almost all Mac game development where before Bungie used to create both Mac and PC games, with a little more emphasis for the Macs.
I suppose Ashcroft and Gonzales have bigger fish to fry because looking at the computer desktop/office monoply isn't worth the USDOJ anti-trust divisions time
A REVIEW OF RECENT ANTITRUST DIVISION ACTIONS
DEBORAH PLATT MAJORAS
Deputy Assistant Attorney General
Antitrust Division
U.S. Department of Justice
June 12, 2003
In United States v. MathWorks, we challenged an agreement between two head-to-head competitors in the design software field: MathWorks and Wind River. Competition between these two had resulted in significant technical improvements and price reductions for consumers. But their collaboration agreement on the sale and development of software gave MathWorks control over the prices, marketing, support, and future development of the Wind River software and required Wind River to stop its own development and marketing. Shortly after the agreement, Math Works announced that it would undertake no further development of the Wind River products. We reached a settlement with MathWorks pursuant to which a trustee was appointed to sell the Wind River assets, which were successfully sold to National Instruments.
Re:I can't imagine (Score:4, Informative)
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning end
or
defaults write com.apple.dock pinning start
Re:Nature of the beast.... (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.
Re:Nature of the beast.... (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
FalconRe:Does Apple sale for twice what Windows users pa (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:Nature of the beast.... (Score:3, Informative)
I was a MacBU intern (ah, the red-headed stepchildren...) in summer 2001. Yes, they really had considered calling it "Office X," but wisely tried saying it out loud before committing themselves. We swore Apple was using us for their OS X beta testing. I saw it core dump more those three months than I have in the four years I've owned an iBook, so they've sorted lots of stuff out since then.
There were as many test engineers for WinWord as there were for all of MacOffice, and I think the ratios for developers and program managers were similar.
MacBU cost MS $50 million a year (150 employees, all the advertising and production costs), and brought in well over $100 million, in the same year that MS was poised to spend $500 million on advertising for Windows XP. So it was/is tiny in comparison with the rest of the company, but quite profitable.
We re-used a fair amount of code from WinOffice, and focused heavily on ensuring compatability with it. Just about all new feature development was in WinOffice. Though there were a few things that were cooler in MacOffice (and MS probably was using it to test out features before putting them in the "real" version).
There was a sense that our continued existence was mostly to keep MS out of hot water, but most of my co-workers were genuinely enthusiastic about Macs, even if they weren't when they first got to MS. Imagine, a little corner of MS that produces Mac fans...