Heres the truth:
Back in the summer of 1997, Apple was in trouble with its developers, installed base and investors. The was chaos in Apples product lines, SKUs with competing capabilities and positioning. Licensees for the Mac OS were clamoring over a go-ahead for new models. Just six months before, Cupertino had brought back Steve Jobs with his NeXT OS to create Apples next-generation OS, but its arrival on the Mac would not come for a long long while.
At the Macworld Expo Boston keynote address, Steve Jobs told the crowd that Apple needed to improve its relationships. It needs help from other partners; it needs to help other partners.
Of course, these partners Jobs mentioned werent the ones that most of the attendees hoped to hear about its Mac OS licensees. Instead, that partner was Microsoft. Surprise! The crowd around me in the Armory hall booed the announcement.
hen, like Big Brother in the famous Apple Superbowl ad, Microsoft CEO and Chairman Bill Gates appeared above us on a huge overhead projection and made his own set of promises. The first was an investment of $150 million in Apple stock.
Gates then said that Microsoft would continue to develop a Mac version of Office for at least 5 more years. In addition, the next version of Office would be a real Mac program and not warmed over Windows leftovers. It will be more advanced than whats on the Windows platform.
This is the event that has been framed as Microsoft saving Apple. That Gates and Microsoft did a good deed for Apple, offered a helping hand out to the poor GUI interface cousin that was seeing bad days. And after the announcement, Apples stock went up, which some saw as proof. Analysts revised their predictions of Apples future prospects from dead or dying to doomed.
Here are some backstory that recasts the myth in a different light:
Microsofts $150 stock investment was the result of a settlement of a lawsuit. In fact, the investment was just an initial payment for other substantial balancing payments that would be spread out over then next few years, then Apple CFO Fred Anderson said at the time.
The exact amount of the settlement is still unknown as far as I am aware. Ive seen estimates from $500 million to more than $1 billion.
The two companies would cross-license all their existing patents, and any new patents that would become available during the next five years.
That Apple would make Internet Explorer the default browser for the Mac. If this seems strange, then understand that it meant that Microsoft would support IE for the next 5 years, during a time when IE was the primary browser on the market and when sites were designed specifically to support it.
