REDMOND – As Apple Computer Inc. enjoys rebounding popularity among computer users rejecting the dominance of Microsoft Corp., one of the biggest beneficiaries – oddly enough – is likely to be Microsoft.
That’s because 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 the Mac.
“We’re ecumenical people,” Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates said. “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.”
Not everyone inside Microsoft, a company whose software runs on more than 90 percent of the world’s computers, sees it that way.
The competition can be intense. Although Apple and Microsoft were founded within months of each other at the dawn of the PC age, the global share of computers running Apple’s Macintosh operating system has been squeezed to only around 2 percent of PCs today, down from a peak of 9.6 percent.
Critics of Microsoft claim the company crushes competitors by copying or buying their innovations and aggressively marketing them under its own brand. Erickson says he gets a kick out of the eyebrows that inevitably raise when he whips out his Apple PowerBook laptop at company meetings.
That’s akin to a Ford Motor Co. executive showing up in a Chevrolet for a meeting with the boss.
Indeed, the two companies perpetuate the rivalry themselves. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs delights in taking pokes at the software behemoth up north.
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.”
Yet, the two companies have a symbiotic relationship.
The number of Office for Mac users is growing, says Microsoft’s Erickson, who uses Windows on a Toshiba laptop and the Mac OS on an Apple PowerBook notebook in his office.
“We’ve sold more copies of Office 2004 in the first three months than we did in the first six months of the last launch of Office for Mac,” he said.
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