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I didn’t know Microsoft’s commitment to develop Office for Mac had a secret requirement that Apple ship at least 3 million computers annually. I’m pretty sure t

by pavlov 4y ago

I didn’t know Microsoft’s commitment to develop Office for Mac had a secret requirement that Apple ship at least 3 million computers annually. I’m pretty sure their sales went below that benchmark level in 2001 — a disaster year when the CRT iMac was stale, the G4 Cube had flopped and Mac OS X shipped unfinished. Apple was closer to death in 2001 than people remember. Losing Office would have been bad. The iPod was a real deus ex machina.

simonh 4y ago
It looks like they were just barely ok on computer sales in 2001, adding up the quarters their accounts say 3,087k 'CPU' sales for the year[0]. Of course even if they had dipped below 3m that doesn't guarantee Microsoft would have pulled full Office support. They would have had the option, but the deal only ran for 5 years from 1997, so it was almost over anyway and they would still have been committed to minor point updates. If they did have a major update in the works at that time for release in the last year of the deal, it would have been so far along in development it might not have made sense to cancel it anyway. Especially if it had already been announced. [0] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/a/NASDAQ_AAPL_2001.pdf https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...