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Well, it's a little more subtle than that. Microsoft produced some of the earliest and most important applications for Macintosh (and still does). Bill sent a f
by wrs 16y ago
Well, it's a little more subtle than that. Microsoft produced some of the earliest and most important applications for Macintosh (and still does). Bill sent a famous letter advising Jobs to license the Mac OS widely (which was honest advice, based on Bill's later actions). A lot of Microsoft's success relative to Apple is where Apple refused to participate in a market (e.g., OSes for commodity hardware) rather than a pure competitive "bet against".
- rbanffy 16y ago> which was honest advice Not really. Gates already had a "Microsoft tax" in place for generic x86 computers, so, any sale of an x86 box running a generic Apple OS would also imply in a sale of an OEM license of DOS. At that time, Gates was developing Windows (perhaps doubting they could pull it off, thus, misleading Apple into spending money on something they regarded as very difficult or impossible) to compete with Apple's proprietary hardware/software stack. Without hardware differentiation, Apple would quickly fail. So, no, I don't think that was honest advice and, much to his credit, neither did Jobs.
- wrs 16y agoIf you read the letter (http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/memo.html http://www.vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/memo.html), Gates's advice was to license Mac hardware technology to OEMs, enabling a "Mac-compatible" hardware market in which licensing the Mac OS would be feasible. It is easy to forget that in 1985, the modern assumption that all computers are identical Intel-specified x86 boxes was not yet in place.