If MS couldn't support them then they might have gone with (horrors) WordPerfect, or later, Corel Office. Lots of companies/schools/research organizations/etc.
MS Office for the Mac also allows MS to compete in the mixed Wintel/Mac marketplace.
Unfortunately this resulted in a butt-ugly/slow/awkward Mac Word 5 so they may have diverged for Mac Word 98 (which interestingly is way nicer then PC Word 97 and even PC Word 2000.) Furthermore remember that products like Word were originally built to be cross-platform indeed they used to be built off of the same interpreted-code base. MS Office for Mac is a big revenue source paying back far more then it costs to develop & support. Three reasons: profit, market share & mind share. "You know, for years, I couldn't quite figure out why Microsoft ported Office and IE to the Mac platform, and to be honest, it's a bit puzzling to me still." By providing an MS alternative it weakens any cross-browser development argument and can seduce intra-net managers and such with a standardised all-MS environment. If MS couldn't produce a credible browser and such then those folks would insist on also developing for the browsers they use - Netscape.
This of course also has the side effect of blunting Netscape's market penetration (a plus in MS's playbook.) Then there's the content-creator issue: A disproportionate amount of web and other high-visibility material is prepared on Macs. This is easiest achieved by using the same techniques it uses on the PC side - a closely tied web-browser and mail client. If MS sells Office for the Mac then it needs to approximate the web-abilities it offers on the PC platform. Finally, why IE and OE? Market share and mind share. Thus MS was willing to go to bat with decent Mac versions to keep its competition from getting a toehold anywhere. Unfortunately this resulted in a butt-ugly/slow/awkward Mac Word 5 so they may have diverged for Mac Word 98 (which interestingly is way nicer then PC Word 97 and even PC Word 2000.) MS Office for the Mac also allows MS to compete in the mixed Wintel/Mac marketplace. "You know, for years, I couldn't quite figure out why Microsoft ported Office and IE to the Mac platform, and to be honest, it's a bit puzzling to me still." Three reasons: profit, market share & mind share. The whole thing's kind of depressing, actually.
Keeping in mind that most people don't believe that giving away IE and integrating it into Windows was done to kill Netscape, I have little hope that anyone's going to do anything about it. Again, though, the legality is basically defined by intent. While both of these companies 'got theirs' in the end, they did a very good job of stomping competition flat (and all the innovations that come with it) for several decades first.Īs far as the legality goes, if Microsoft's intent in buying Visio is to leverage (blech hate that word) the Windows monopoly in order to gain the same dominance in the productivity market that they have in the 'office suite' market (which, as you pointed out, they basically created for the purpose), then yes, that's illegal. Pan Am back in the early part of the century, and RCA in about the same time frame, are two excellent examples of times the gov't stayed hands off when they probably should have gotten involved. After all, it's fairly easy to show that these things benefit the consumer short term, and difficult to show the long term damage. There is a long history of these types of market consolidations, and invariably the gov't stays out of it unless it gets ridiculous. Problem is, it would be a really hard sell to gov't regulators.