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Re: The IBM PC's slavish devotion to the Apple II
Greg Buchner wrote:
The info on this is that when Apple & Microsoft made a deal to keep MS
Office on the Mac (a no brainer for a company that's trying to rake in
all the cash in the world) and make IE the default browser on the Macs,
MS bought $150 million worth of Apple Preferreed Stock (no voting
rights, just extra consideration in dividends AFAIK). This happened
while Apple had a couple of billion in the bank. They didn't need to be
bailed out.
I believe this was beneficial for both companies, MS in the fact that
they were involved with their monopoly stuff with the government at that
point and MS wanted to make certain people knew there was another OS out
there that they supported and for Apple in that it made certain that
Office would be available for the Mac for 5 years. Although now that
the 5 years has come and gone, MS is still keeping Office going for the
Mac.
Greg B.
And part of the deal was Apple would drop their lawsuit against MS.
Apple claimed they'd licenced their GUI to MS for the first version of
Windows only while MS claimed their licence applied to all versions of
Windows
Wayne