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Re:Google's Plan to Stop Apple from Getting Serious About Se... by Terretta on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:49PM (#38043737)
> The antitrust fights against Microsoft I think were a big reason why IE and Word ended up coming to MacOS.

Word was on Mac in 1985, Windows in 1989. There was an earlier version of Word for DOS.

Excel was on Mac first in 1985, and on Windows in 1987.

Re:Google's Plan to Stop Apple from Getting Serious About Se... by danShumway on Sunday October 29, 2023 @06:11PM (#38063370)
This is technically true (the best kind of true), but fails to mention that there was both a huge gap between Office on the Mac between 4.2 and 98 (coincidentally the version that came out in 1998 right around the antitrust case), and more importantly, ignores the fact that Microsoft literally is on record threatening to use Office to kill Mac, and negotiations around Office were literally presented as evidence during the antritust case against Microsoft: https://www.macworld.com/article/184614/macoffice.html

> Later, the U.S. Department of Justice included the bundling of Internet Explorer among the charges it brought against Microsoft in its antitrust case. "Microsoft, by threatening to cease development of its Office for Macintosh productivity suite, coerced Apple into making Internet Explorer the default browser on all Macintosh operating systems and to disadvantage competing browsers," the federal agency charged in 1998.

It's not really debatable whether an unchecked Microsoft monopoly would have affected Office on the Mac, it was straight-up part of the antitrust case against Microsoft. Delaying and degrading Office releases on Mac was the active policy of Microsoft by the late 1990s, both because it gave Microsoft power over Apple during business negotiations and because it allowed Microsoft to simultaneously hold off competing office-suite products while pulling more users away from Mac towards Windows, which had more up-to-date and less buggy versions of Office and IE.