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Comment by jusben1369 | Hacker News Reader

It has. And it was pretty good. Ironically at the time it was made available it was part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back (See we are supporting another platform! wink wink) My how times have changed.

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Microsoft made Office for the mac long before that deal was made, and it was only done as a show of confidence for the Mac platform; Apple didn't really need the money (they had more than few billion in the bank, were still profitable, and far from death). To paraphrase Mark Twain, "news of Apple's impending death had been greatly exaggerated."

>> part of MSFT's injection of cash into a near death APPL and a way for MSFT to get the monopoly police off their back

Afaik, it was a deal that Jobs made (with some other parts) because Microsoft had been found to have code in its Windows' video software that came from Quicktime.

I googled this:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-m...

"At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a US$150 million investment in Apple." - People forget back then that if MSFT dropped Office support for Apple it would have been a significant blow.

- Then Steve Jobs himself. I think these specifics support my initial comment.

"If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software. So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again."

You really quote a marketing spin presentation as truth?! From Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs?!

Again, this is an old subject. Google "video for windows" "source code" apple quicktime

E.g.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_for_Windows#Overview

"In 1995, Video for Windows became an issue in a lawsuit Apple filed against Microsoft, Intel, and the San Francisco Canyon Company, regarding the alleged theft of several thousand lines of QuickTime source code to improve the performance of Video for Windows.[3][4][5][6] This lawsuit was ultimately settled in 1997, when Apple agreed to make Internet Explorer the default browser over Netscape, and Microsoft agreed to continue developing Office and other software for the Mac for the next 5 years, and purchase $150 million of non-voting Apple stock."

Hey BugBrother. MSFT could have a) Settled and written a check for $500 mil and b) stopped supporting Office on the Mac the next day and it's likely Apple would be a business school case study about how you fall into the ashes.Back at that time the only people using Macs in the corporate environment were talented people buried away in the marketing department doing unique design work. They were the only people who were tolerated by corporate IT (and then often begrudgingly so) And the only reason they could even keep using their Macs in this Windows XP world was because they could at least exchange Word/PowerPoint and Excel docs from the 98% of the employees using Windows. Add to that all the independent and small consulting shops who had to accept Office Docs from their corporate clients. MSFT's support for Office on the Mac was lukewarm at best leading up to this. Mac users lived in real fear that at any point MSFT would simply drop support for the Mac. It would have been a deathblow. A few hundred million for some code infringement (and it would only have been that based on the dynamics you list) would have simply forestalled the inevitable.

You're changing the subject after your wild claims are shown to be trivially wrong?

But ok, I can comment:

As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.

Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.

I could also note, re your claims about Office and corporate environments, that there were virtual machines that ran Windows and Office.

An anecdote:

One infamous Word/Excel version (6 iirc?) ran faster on emulated Windows using a different processor architecture than as an application. (I have never trusted a Microsoft product since then -- you never know when paying the strategy tax will rape functionality you depend on.)

But you almost certainly knew this.

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