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Last week, with Apple overtaking Microsoft in market capitalization — and with the floating of a crazy rumor that Microsoft's Steve Ballmer would talk up iPhone and Visual Studio at the keynote of next month's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference — news stories on the Web, in print and on the tube repeated a serious urban myth: By David Morgenstern for The Apple Core May 30, -- Here's the most common version of the myth from the San Francisco Chronicle:.

The partnership allowed Apple to go about narrowing its focus to building well-designed products for consumers. This urban myth won't die and as we can see, it's now accepted in the Apple-Microsoft canon.

Back in the summer of , Apple was in trouble with its developers, installed base and investors. The was chaos in Apple's 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 Apple's next-generation OS, but its arrival on the Mac would not come for a long long while.

And then there were worries about Microsoft Office for the Mac. As I wrote in a post about the anniversary of the keynote:. Worry over MS Office was a concern expressed then by the professional Mac community on the pages of MacWEEK where I worked as a senior editor. MS Word and Excel were used in all professional content workflows and Mac businesses.

And in academia and government.

Techmeme

They were critical applications. At the Macworld Expo Boston keynote address, Steve Jobs told the crowd that Apple needed to improve its relationships.

Of course, these "partners" Jobs mentioned weren't the ones that most of the attendees hoped to hear about — its Mac OS licensees. Instead, that partner was Microsoft. The crowd around me in the Armory hall booed the announcement. Better living without MS Office. Then, 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.

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. 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, Apple's stock went up, which some saw as proof. Analysts revised their predictions of Apple's future prospects from "dead or dying" to "doomed. 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. 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. What was this legal action that gave Apple so much leverage over Redmond? It was a strange one: San Francisco Canyon Co.

Charges of copyright infringement and wrongdoing were raised last week by Apple, which filed an intellectual-property suit against The San Francisco Canyon Co.

But the scope of the court action encompasses industry giants Microsoft Corp. Canyon worked on digital video software for both Apple's QuickTime for Windows and Intel's Display Control Interface DCI. Apple alleges its copyrighted code found its way into the shipping version of Microsoft's Video for Windows and will be used in future software from both companies.

Seven months later, Canyon delivered its code to Intel, giving video for Windows 1. A few months later, Apple added Intel and Microsoft to the action. In later testimony, Apple showed that thousands of lines of "significant programming code" for video acceleration used in Windows came directly from Apple's QuickTime for Windows.

A couple of years go by and the companies were all kisses and hugs for the keynote address to the Boston Macworld Expo. So, is there any ring of "irony" here as the reports make it sound? Not much to my ears. Microsoft and Intel got their fingers caught in the source code and paid for it.

Microsoft hired a larger team of former Apple programers, which didn't help Apple directly, and Microsoft Office returned to being real Mac programs instead of lackluster ports. If we want to look for irony here, perhaps it can be found in the news that both Apple and Microsoft have recently issued public statements supporting H.

Yes, Microsoft Did Change The World More Than Apple - Business Insider

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