outside of Apple itself, Microsoft sells more software for Apple's flagship Macintosh computers than any other company. With sales of Macintosh machines rising sharply, archrival Microsoft stands to bolster its long-standing business selling Office and other programs for Mac.“We're ecumenical people,” said Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. “We have to run everything. Our first graphics interface was on the Macintosh. We've always done well on Macs.”
Microsoft executives declined to discuss just how well, and the company does not break Mac sales out in its financial reports. But Microsoft's Mac offerings are routinely credited as being more innovative, elegant and robust than its mainline PC products.
They are designed and written mostly in a small warren of offices on Microsoft's sprawling campus here. Apple posters decorate the walls of the Mac Business Unit — a name with none of the evocative verbal polish Apple famously applies to its products.
“We don't see Apple as a rival,” said Scott Erickson, director of product management and marketing for the 200-plus-employee Mac BU. “We see it as another vendor.”
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Indeed, the two companies perpetuate the rivalry themselves. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs delights in taking pokes at the software behemoth up north. At a developers' conference in June, Jobs demonstrated a new program for the Mac that counts down the seconds to a chosen date. Setting a countdown clock for Dec. 31, 2006, Jobs said to hearty guffaws, “Let's call this file, I don't know … 'Longhorn',” referring to the code name for Microsoft's next version of the Windows operating system, which has been delayed about two years and is expected late next year.At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, comedian Conan O'Brien joked at a presentation with Gates about going to a bar together: “I got so drunk that I woke up with a hooker; Bill got so drunk he woke up with an Apple computer.”
Chicago Tribune | Mac's Gains a Boon to Microsoft
Of course, there is no guarantee that Microsoft will continue to make products for the Mac. MS has stopped developing Internet Explorer, and I'm sure isn't too happy that Apple's iWork suite (with word processor and presentation software) is a rival to Office.
