The Mac Business Unit
Last week, MS announced that the Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) has launched the biggest recruitment drive since the unit was formed eleven years ago. In the 1997 deal, MS gave Apple a $150 million cash transfusion, plus an undertaking to release Office 98 for Mac promptly and upgrade it regularly.
In exchange, Apple agreed to bundle Internet Explorer for Mac on all its systems. The deal, therefore, extended a helping hand to a niche competitor, Apple, while shutting another door to Netscape, which posed a far broader threat to MS’s market dominance.
For a while, Mac BU became the largest Mac software developer after Apple itself, and the unit still earns MS about $350 million a year. All in all, a pretty good return on investment, as well as a classic illustration of what a brilliant businessman Bill Gates has been.
Nor should we forget that support for MS Exchange is the key component of Apple’s hopes to break into the mobile enterprise market with the iPhone G3. In sum, the generational conflict portrayed in the ad campaign is more like a father indulging a son than any head-butting competition.
By the way, Microsoft's press site yielded this wonderfully cheesy tribute to the great man. It requires Silverlight to be installed.
