Memo: Microsoft threatened to nix Mac Office

In an internal memo recently made public as the result of a settled Iowa antitrust case, Ben Waldman, head of Microsoft's Macintosh development group at the time, can be seen urging then CEO Bill Gates to use the development of Microsoft Office 1997 for the Mac as a bargaining chip. "The threat to cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to Apple immediately. I also think that Apple is taking this threat pretty seriously," Waldman wrote.

As we now know, Microsoft and Apple announced a massive deal a few weeks later, under which Microsoft purchased $150 million of then worthless Apple stock. For its part, Apple agreed to bundle Internet Explorer with OS X. This move ended up backfiring, as the U.S. Department of Justice later accused Microsoft of using Office to coerce Apple into a bundling deal, thereby ensuring its cross-platform dominance of the web. In the memo, Waldman also points to the Mac as a possible testing ground for new features in Office. "Because Mac Office is so much less critical to our business than Windows, we have the flexibility to test out new things in the product before we try them on Windows," Waldman wrote. "I've personally also found the Mac market interesting because I've seen so many trends appear there first and eventually become important on Windows." Now there's a quote that's likely to show up in Internet flame wars.

For more on the memo:
- see this ComputerWorld article