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Apple - Microsoft deal© Jude Coughlin
Aug 12, 1997
Being one of those people who are usually refered to as being "rabidly anti-Microsoft" the deal as reported in the newspapers should normally have caused incoherent rage. Luckily for us, and the first person who told me about the deal, I'd been keeping track of the Macworld expo, and especially Steve Jobs keynote speech in the hopes of picking up some news about Apple's Rhapsody OS. This means I actually got a hold of the plain facts about the deal before the news media got their headlines from it. (By the way I'm rabidly anti-Microsoft not because I'm a Mac fanatic, but rather because the vast majority of my job at Uni consists of trying to get Microsoft products, applications as well as operating systems, to work right on my Uni's Novel network. If any of you people out there could tell me why Word occasionally makes documents "read only" and, more importantly, how to fix the damn thing, I'd be most grateful. As a side issue, Word crashed while I was writing this article, and decided that every eighth or so letter I typed was not what I really wanted, and would look better changed to some random character, very Microsoft.) The Facts Microsoft will buy US$150 million Apple non-voting shares. This is equivalent to 5 to 8 percent of Apple depending on the final price. Apple and Microsoft are to cross license all existing patents, and all future patents for the next five years. In addition Microsoft will pay an undisclosed amount over the next few years for Apple's patents. Microsoft is committed to producing Macintosh versions of its Office Applications suite, and Internet Explorer web browser for at least 5 more years. The applications are to have feature parity, or better, with their windows versions and to be released at the same time. Other applications may or may not be included in the deal, it is unclear at this time which ones are. Microsoft games are definitely not included, and Microsoft statements seem to confine the deal to business applications. Also it is apparent that for the moment Rhapsody versions of these programs are not covered by this deal.
Apple will make Internet Explorer the default browser for new Operating System installations. Apple will still bundle Netscape and its own Cyberdog with its operating system, but users will have to choose to install them. Apple and Microsoft are committed to producing compatible versions of Java Virtual Machines for their platforms. This basically means that any program coded in Java will run the same on both Macintosh and Windows platforms.
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