Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ...
by celoyd on Friday March 02, 2012 @05:33PM
(#3658666)
Partly.
All through the 90s, Apple had ClarisWorks/AppleWorks,[0] which were basically what iWork is now – including that few serious Office users would look twice at them. (I liked them a lot, but I’m not in the Office demographic.)
And Apple was never heavily dependent on IE, because Navigator was always around. Safari had more to do with both IE and Navigator being awful, and with the long game of getting a light and fast browser ready for mobile and embedded devices.[1]
1. Recall that c. 2003, everything was pointing towards enormously bloated browsers. Jobs was already thinking about iP[oa]ds, and clearly anything on the Netscape codebase’s size trend line would be a dog. Firefox – Mozilla lite – was also a response to this, though as far as I know not with smartphones in mind.
All through the 90s, Apple had ClarisWorks/AppleWorks,[0] which were basically what iWork is now – including that few serious Office users would look twice at them. (I liked them a lot, but I’m not in the Office demographic.)
And Apple was never heavily dependent on IE, because Navigator was always around. Safari had more to do with both IE and Navigator being awful, and with the long game of getting a light and fast browser ready for mobile and embedded devices.[1]
0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks#AppleWorks.2FClarisW...
1. Recall that c. 2003, everything was pointing towards enormously bloated browsers. Jobs was already thinking about iP[oa]ds, and clearly anything on the Netscape codebase’s size trend line would be a dog. Firefox – Mozilla lite – was also a response to this, though as far as I know not with smartphones in mind.