Submitted by Documentary evidence that Microsoft considered abandoning Office for Mac in order to cause ‘a great deal of harm’ to Apple has emerged. An emailed memo from Microsoft-founder Bill Gates to then Mac Business Unit chief Ben Waldman dated June 1997 talks about morale in the Mac Office development camp. At that time Microsoft’s senior management were considering dumping Mac support. 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.
Or threaten to do it.
Apple owns Apple works (claris works)
AppleWorks/ClarisWorks doesn’t come close to competing with MS Office, even back when Microsoft was considering dumping Office for the Mac. I think that a lack of Mac Office would have done quite a bit of harm to Apple back then; there weren’t many–if any–serious competitors for Office on the Mac. Furthermore, Apple was on its last legs and struggling to stay afloat at that time. Its marketshare was dwindling next to nothing, and Apple’s saving graces, the iMac and iPod, were yet to be released.
Unfortunately, Apple discontinued AppleWorks–it is no longer being updated and there’s not an Intel port. I think Apple is trying to replace AppleWorks with iWork. Until iWork matures some more and gets spreadsheet and database applications, there’s no way it can directly compete with MS Office (or even AppleWorks, really, IMHO).
Edited 2007-03-06 23:13
>> Furthermore, Apple was on its last legs <<
Huh?
Apple was on it’s last legs?????
When?
With Billions in Cash Reserves?
I don’t think so.
Back in 1996-1997, Apple didn’t have billions and billions of dollars. Even if they did, they were going through CEOs like they were disposable, and mismanagement was making the company go into a tailspin. On top of that was failures of several products (The Newton, QuickTime Camera, Pippin, Copland).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.
QuickTake camera, you clod.
shykid is right! During this period (96/97 and even later) things were very, very shaky for Apple financially. Rumours of Apples demise were rife for the reasons already stated above.
Jobs’ return sure turned things around for Apple but things didn’t change overnight.
Still people say that Apple is dying or will die if they don’t do this or that
Apple will go under and die… if they don’t give me a free laptop, desktop, server, iPod, iPhone, free upgrades for life, and e-mail this to at least 100 people.
Seriously I think Apple will be around for a long time to come. Not everybody likes Apple or Microsoft or Linux or [insert something here]. At least it’s nice to have a choice, even if you can’t choose the one you really want.
That would be nice. Then maybe WordPerfect would finally be in the hands of somebody who wants to make it competitive.
Or even better, they should do as they did when MS stoped developing IE for mac; fork an FOSS project. They could use OpenOffice, koffice or even gnome office and port it to cocoa. But there is probably no need as MS is still developing office for mac.
Or even better support development of a native (as in non X11) version of OpenOffice.org or have their Claris products use ODF as default format. That way it would be possible to create cross platform office environment without involving Microsoft or other software vendors. This would make Apple less vulnerable to similar threats in the future. However,that option was of course not available back in 1997.
Apple’s cash cows right now are the iPod and iTunes series. Even if Apple left the computer market entirely, Apple would still be a Fortune 500 company…
Apple’s cash cows right now…
quoting the article summary: “…dated June 1997…”
Even without considering that we are talking about the past, the iPod, iTunes integrate very well with Macs and OS X. The computer market share of Apple is raising.
Thus not selling computers *would* hurt Apple.
Having said that, I don’t feel the need at all for Office 2004. I use NeoOffice instead.
Who needed an article to tell them this? Additionally, I don’t think it would hurt Apple that much.
Considering that there are plenty of Open Source alternatives (And some iirc even specially geared for MacOSX).
I think it would of made MS look bad more than it hurt Apple.
The article dates this plan to 1997. Open source was streets behind the flagship office suites of the time.
Edited 2007-03-07 10:45
Oh, you’re right. Here’s a mod up.
Fascinating insight inside. Thought the contents did not reflect the title at all but it worked and got me to read it so maybe the end does justify…, Bill merely said threatening so is their strongest bargaining chip they had to make Apple open up not wild eyed flailing about looking for some way to deliver the death blow, sounds more like he was disappointed in not having a bigger market on the mac. Good stuff regardless.
Agreed. BillG is a nothing if not a good businessman. The reps weren’t happy, the MS Mac engineers weren’t happy, sales were slow…what incentive did they really have to keep pouring a bunch of money into a product that was seemingly on its deathbed?
I’m glad they did though…MS Office is a huge selling point for Mac owners.
You should all read the original document here
http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_6060….
It actually sounds pretty positive, not negative. It doesn’t sound at all like they were trying to dump office to hurt Apple, in fact he said it was a good barganing tool in some discussions, but then later said that regardless of the outcome they should release Office anyway.
I’m surprised that so few have actually read the document, it sound like gates was busy trying to promote mac support inside microsoft and get apple to be more constructive.
Its very obvious that gates/microsoft were not considering dumping office. And were all about ramping up support for office for the Mac.
Do the OSnews editors actually read what they post?
Might want to take that up with “jayson.knight,” who submitted the article.
Almost exclusively, we post what is submitted.
MS Office for Mac… $280
NeoOffice or Mac… $ 0
OpenOffice Mac… $ 0
N.O. & O.O. both have 90+% of the functionality of MSO. So try supporting software makers that support you. I’ve been using NeoOffice for over a year, and its been very good, plus it uses Open Document Format as its default. Can you live with only 90+% of MSO’s functions?… Hell, I could, and for a lot less than $280!!
Did you read the article? It is from 1997, your price quotes are fairly meaningless in that context.
And to speak to your percentages, how many enterprises have a few Macs? Lots. Maybe just small departments here and there, but no MS Office would be a deal killer for them. Particularly when that 10% that you speak of means the difference between interoperating with the rest of the enterprise or not.
Yes, for casual home or even small business use, OpenOffice or NeoOffice are great. But MS abandoning Mac Office would have been a serious set back for OS X.
I totally agree, that 90% compatibility is meaningless in the enterprise. We could not use Open Office in several of the clients that I have dealt with because of needing 100% compatibility with Excel for dynamic data driven reports.
New versions of MS-Office seldom are 100% compatible with older versions. The reason that Microsoft Office works so is that the entire organization usually changes version simultaneously and the spreadsheets are fixed to work with the new version if any problems should occur.
Switching to OpenOffice.org in all places would not be more problematic than upgrading to the next version of MS-Office, and even if it was more difficult, there would be a lot of money to save on licensing that could be used to convert whatever few spreadsheets that didn’t work. My guess is that they would be very few, the OOo, MS-Office interoperability have increased a lot lately due to additions from e.g. Novell.
The problem is that Apple users will not accept OpenOffice.org unless there is a version running without X11.
The problem is that Apple users will not accept OpenOffice.org unless there is a version running without X11.
You make it sound as if that is some unreasonable demand. Have you seen OpenOffice running under X11 on OS X? If so, you will understand the concern. The fonts look weird, and more importantly the keybindings are all wrong.
NeoOffice is getting there, but it’ll be a while before it gets reaches the same level of spit and polish that commercial products have.
“I totally agree, that 90% compatibility is meaningless in the enterprise. ”
Barring its use in DTP departments, which probably do not use MS Office or at least the “enterprise” features of MS Office anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is more “meaningless” in the enterprise than OpenOffice.
There WAS no OS X in 1997. In 1997, we were still using Mac OS 8.
And losing office for the Mac wouldn’t have hurt Apple all that much since under OS 8/9 there were plenty of alternatives.
ClarisWorks
AppleWorks
Write Now
Mariner Write
WordPerfect
and many others.
And even if Microsoft had stopped developing Office for the Mac, the existing version at the time would still have worked fine for some time to come.
Open Office had not even been ported to MacOS at that time.
Let’s put this in perspective
Or you can run with virtualization solaris x86 and buy a cheap licence for StarOffice.
Apple did a great favor for Microsoft by turning the Mac into an ordinary PC. Now there are a few vendors offering Macs with Windows Vista pre-installed.
Now with BIOS emulation ontop of EFI it is totally possible to install Windows, Linux, *BSD, Solaris, etc. without bootcamp or Mac OS X. Just convert the GUID partition table into a DOS-type one with a MBR.
if you buy a mac with only windows vista you can forget about support from apple and then you have to fight with the company that installed windows vista on the mac if it doesn’t work like you expected it to do
Read the document. It’s a very interesting read.
… in this case nothing = a ten year old memo
ClarisWorks/AppleWorks is dead – and quite honestly a poor product. It was Ok back in the days of System 7/8 but not now.
OO.org is nice and it’s free
Besides, apple already has an office suite…sort of.
mail application = mail
word processing = Pages
Powerpoint = Keynote
Excel = ‘numbers’ or whatever they are announcing at macworld
There was never access on mac, so no great loss there. There is also evidence that access is going the way of the dinosaur to give way to MS SQL on the desktop.
And requires the clunky, non-default X.org to run.
Who uses Pages for word processing?? TextEdit is fine for just jotting notes. Serious document editing that you prepare for a business exchange needs Word, as it stands today.
You mean Macworld from about 60 days ago? As of today, there is no official Apple spreadsheet app, period.
No there’s not at all. SQL 2000, released 8 years ago, had the Personal Edition. There was also MSDE. SQL Server 2005 has the newly named version of the same personal edition. And Access is still integrated into Office 2007, redesigned complete with a new file format. What evidence is there that Microsoft would take their premier desktop database app and retire it? Solely the existence of similar products that are not even remotely as widely deployed and not at all compatible?
I always wonder why people write down such things? Time & time again, “internal memos” are used against some person or company. They always seem to come to light at the damnedest times…
I only read half of the memo, but I have a hard time seeing how it could hurt Microsoft.
The “do harm to Apple” bit is quoted out of context. This document appears to be from the time when Apple and Microsoft were discussing cross-licensing agreements (and that infamous injection of fund by Microsoft into Apple). It was a business negotiation and Microsoft was simply using hardball tactics in order to get the best deal. They were not out to destroy their competition, or get vengeance upon Apple or any of that other nonsense.
On the contrary, it looks like they wanted to meet the needs of their customers who used Mac OS. Anyone can tell you, and that document mentions, that Word 6 and friends sucked. Apple had a very hard time killing Word 5.1 because it was a vastly superior product (in some ways, it may still be a vastly superior product). Microsoft’s MBU did not want to make the same mistake so the memo was talking about how they addressed the needs of Apple customers this time, rather than doing a port of their Windows product.
Finally, you cannot stop issuing memos. You need communications within a business, and even though I heard that Microsoft has a policy of regularly destroying those communications, some must be maintained in order to ensure the operations of the business and that they can learn from their historical practices.
How blatantly obvious does it have to be that Microsoft is a predatory anti competitive, monopolistic law breaking giant? Sure, Microsoft didn’t drop office, probably cos it was worried about getting slammed for being anti competitive. The Comes case is very interesting, lots of interesting things have come out of it, now if only the US DOJ will get off its fat lazy ass and actually do the job that the US tax payers pay it to do – stop this sort of behaviour [from Microsoft].
Until then, I can only laugh at how poor, and how fake the US political, businesses and legal systems are.
Dave
I’m curious as to how dropping a product due to low ROI equates to being anti-competitive in your world?
Also, RTFA…it has nothing to do with anything you mentioned. It’s actually a fascinating read.
And use some common sense. A product with low ROI? Maybe that’s cos Microsoft has been using anti competitive and monopolistic behaviour for a long while, thus killing off the competition (illegally)!!!
I can use acronyms as well: GAB.
Dave
I’m curious as to how dropping a product due to low ROI equates to being anti-competitive in your world?
Because for years MS pointed to Apple as “evidence” that they did not have a monopoly, and yet were seemingly perfectly aware that dropping MS Office (whether they did it, considered it, threatened it, or just dreamed about it) would bring the Apple platform crashing down around Cupertino ears?
Oops. Messed up and replied to the wrong post earlier in this thread. Thanks for posting this very interesting article, jason.knight.
Didn’t MS contribute money to Apple in the late 90’s, once or twice?
It’s in MS’s best interest that Apple stays alive and productive.
Yes, about $190million, I think. But it wasn’t a contribution as such. MS picked up a boatload of non-voting shares, which they later sold off at a rather nice profit.
Edited 2007-03-07 08:21
Smart move for MS. Never knew they were shareholders, at one time.
Didn’t MS contribute money to Apple in the late 90’s, once or twice?
It’s in MS’s best interest that Apple stays alive and productive.
Indeed. Why? Because Apple are no threat either (a) in the enterprise or (b) the desktops of most consumers.
Yup. Regardless of how few systems Apple sells, as long as their doors are open, and the board of directors is getting paid; Microsoft can respond to any monopoly allegations by pointing the finger at Apple and saying, “What monopoly? We have competition.”
pointing the finger at Apple and saying, “What monopoly? We have competition.”
Actually that would be of no value to Microsoft.
Never knew they were shareholders, at one time
These non-voting shares you refer to were part of a settlement. Many people have some convoluted idea that it was MS “saving” Apple from financial ruin. Apple was in trouble, but by no means dead. Apple was not being cooperative with MS, primarily due to issues concerning Quicktime code. You should look it up. Some keywords would be ‘Quicktime’, ‘Canyon’, Intel’, and ‘Microsoft’. The email referenced in the article takes on some very different meaning when you put it into a bigger picture.
Edited 2007-03-08 02:36
Thanks for posting this article. Very interesting read. It is unfortunate that so many don’t read before commenting. I see many comments that have been formed over the email juxtaposed as evidence in an anti-trust trial. It is much more interesting as a piece of history.
that this was happening 1997 and not yesterday? Why would apple buy or threaten to buy anyone on a case that is ten years old?
Not to mention that i wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft dropped any Mac support, after all Apple doesn’t pass a single opportunity to insult Microsoft and its products. That isn’t quite the behaviour you would normally accept from an business partner.
Right now such a step by Microsft wouldn’t have that much of an impact. ODF is on the doorstep and dropping Mac Office support now would only accelerate that process.
Not to mention that i wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft dropped any Mac support, after all Apple doesn’t pass a single opportunity to insult Microsoft and its products. That isn’t quite the behaviour you would normally accept from an business partner.
Nor is, oh I don’t know, threatening to drop the one product your business partner knows keeps its only “competition” alive, dropping your flagship desktop operating system in favour of something designed to compete with it (through a marketing strategy, not technologically), introducing incompatibilities into your network protocol….
Thank God for companies/organizations like Red Hat/OO.org. They bring some sanity to the other insane anti-competitive nature of the business of ALL the old proprietary companies in the industry (including MS and Apple).
whether on the Mac or the PC. My MacBook has Abiword and Neo Office, and they do what I need. I could easily install Office on my VMWare windows installation, I have the disks, but I have no interest.
As it stands right now Macs & Linux share of the market are about the same, and we Linux folk make it day to day without MS Office. Although in 1997 I don’t think OO was around so at the time it could have been very bad.
Perhaps it’s because desktop Linux and Mac OS X serve two different demographics?
crappy journalist contradicts him/herself immediately by saying the reason to condsider dropping were poor sales & to increase company focus. blatant whoring for page views. don’t visit.
(wow, MS a victim of FUD, not a perpetrator; whatever next?)
To show that Microsoft did contemplate using their tremendous market power in one market (office software) to harm a competitor in an unrelated market (operating systems software). If you’re suing Microsoft, these are probably the kinds of statements that you could use to bolster an argument that they had the intent to use their market dominance (monopoly or near monopoly) to harm competitors. Which, in the US, is generally illegal when you have such a strong market position (IANAL).
“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.”
I am tired and really hate trying to read poorly worded sentences.
edited to fix one of my own typos. Can you guys do the same.
Edited 2007-03-07 04:10
I mean, seriously, it was 10 years ago. TEN fscking years. And they didn’t even really consider dumping it so the article headline is wrong.
I guess “10 years ago MS was levelheaded with regards to Office on Mac” doesn’t pack quite the same punch, does it?
Edited 2007-03-07 05:18
Two proprietary blockheads fighting each other … nice. I read some postings above,
>It’s in MS’s best interest that Apple stays alive and productive.
1. Apple is no threat
2. most of the software Apple is using is from BSD and open-source
Difference between Apple and Microsoft? The latter is just to dumb doing a proper assembling of bought or “stolen”/lend code. The innovative Apple died with WOZ.
It’d be nice to see Apple bring back a reborn version of AppleWorks. As far as my opinion; I believe this is a 40% business ploy 60% childish move upon behalf of Microsoft.
MS: ‘They’re starting to become more popular again, and damn, Vista was pirated, >:( We’re gonna take office away from them.
Personally I hope they do take office, there’s always OpenOffice.org, and hell, who knows Apple might just get some of their famous creative juices flowing again, and perhaps AppleWorks will be reborn into something better than MS Office.
Edited 2007-03-07 13:55
It’d be nice to see Apple bring back a reborn version of AppleWorks.
Myself, I’d just like to see ClarisWorks and Hypercard come back.
(The original programmers are still around, so this is one of those ‘if I had a million dollars’ scenarios.)
I’m not sure apple would care they’ve never really been concerned with the business demographic….
I’m not sure apple would care they’ve never really been concerned with the business demographic….
I certainly hope (and think) they would have. Companies that rely on Microsoft/PC products to survive and ignore that fact go the way of Commodore.
PowerPoint = Keynote
Word = OpenOffice or NeoOffice, or maybe Pages
Excel = OO/NO(, or iWork 07?)
As said before, I think MS would hurt themselfs.
Very few tech articles with a date of “1997” hold any relevance, but the fact that a company was considering doing something to hurt a competitor falls under Section D.U.H. of “being a large business.” I just don’t see any point in discussing whether something that was decided ages ago was really a good idea if there’s no chance of doing anything differently at this point.
Very few tech articles with a date of “1997” hold any relevance
The article just came out, it is not from 1997. The memos the article’s about, which have surfaced in the current Iowa anti-trust trial, *are* from 1997.
The news is not that MS is considering dropping MS Office for Mac, but rather that we now have proof that it did consider it back in 1997. That is not irrelevant in the context of anti-trust trial.
Geez, does anybody even read the articles anymore?
the fact that a company was considering doing something to hurt a competitor falls under Section D.U.H. of “being a large business.”
There are rules businesses must abide with, especially when they dominate a particular market. It is *not* just “business as usual”…
Edited 2007-03-07 17:03
I realize the article is new, the relevant information, as you’ve stated, regards 10-year-old decisions. Perhaps I posted a bit much like a jerk, but the point I was trying to make is that I find it shocking that this isn’t past our collective “statute of limitations” regarding topic relevancy. To me, it’s as if a memo surfaced recently showing that Novell considered dropping TCP/IP support altogether in favor of IPX–it just doesn’t matter today.
And rules or no rules, pondering ways to crush your competitors should be expected. In the business world, “ponderings” often get passed around as memos. The fact is they didn’t drop Mac Office support at the time, *and* not all managers involved are even still at Microsoft.
I apologize for the a**hole-ishness of my original post.
I think it paid off for MS in the long run now. Interesting now one can run Windows better on a mac than with Virtual PC. So I think with more sales of Windows OS for Mac computers and Mac Office is a good thing for both companies. Even though they fight like Essah and Jacob most of the time!
Microsoft’s nixing of VBA support for Mac Office 2008 is nearly as damaging.
Any macros in Word/Excel will have to be converted to AppleScript for them to work on a Mac. (and visa versa)
Very few businesses will want to deal with that sort of incompatibility.
Even as I type this on my MacBook Pro, I’m a firm believer in laissez-faire capitalism. If I ran Microsoft, I’d have thought the same thoughts and might even have done it. It’s business.
Unless of course it was merely malicious and there was no sound business reason for it. Even then, while I support the right of a company to drop support for any product they wish at any time (barring contractual agreements), I think it’s just plain wrong to do it out of pure malice.
As a Windows to Mac switcher I thought I would take the time to read through the original email carefully, and I have come to a completely different conclusion to both PCWorld that originated the article and Jayson (tell me if I am wrong) who has perhaps posted the article because he agrees with their sentiment.
What struck me was the opening comment by Bill Gates, “I admit we have neglected the Mac”. This comment in itself shows that the stance by PCWorld is wrong here.
My position towards Microsoft has maybe even softened a little after reading this. I have several reasons for disliking Microsoft, this email does not confirm any of them.