Microsoft's US$150 million charity toss to Apple - roughly the equivalent of what Bill Gates earns in interest in the time it takes to launch and crash IE 4.0 on a Mac - was last week's loudest sneeze. Hundreds hissed Steve Jobs' Macworld announcement, sensing a fritter in Apple's future, but as Jobs stated, reporters repeated, and Wall Street reaffirmed: For Apple to win, Microsoft doesn't need to lose. It had better not, for Apple's sake.
Of course, it's been years since one could credibly argue that Apple was a genuine competitor to Microsoft - they're barely in the same industry. Apple manufactures design stations for students, zealots, and student zealots; Microsoft sells software to apatheists, the despotic depot for OfficeMaximizers. If anyone was twisting their morning papers into Bic-friendly Gates effigies, it must have been the most credible contenders to Microsoft: code colossus Netscape.
More and more, it looks like "the browser is the OS" is the meme genie too obese to fit back in the bottle. Once sublime hyperbole among Netscape investors, the 4.0 showdown looks to be a literal reinterpretation of the rhetoric - on Microsoft's part at least, with IE 4.0 little more than a rough beta of Windows 98. It's apropos that the pledge from Apple to resist homogenization by "maintaining differences where differences are important" came from executive marketing VP Guerrino DeLuca. With Microsoft's promise of continued MS Office support, joint pursuit of Sun's platform-indifferent "the network is the computer" nirvana, and the eventual OS-integrated Web/desktop browser, the distinctions might only be intelligible via the advertising.
The outcry of Apple supporters was overstated, though understandable - once the worm burrows in, it might be impossible to cut around. That the Apple board's bite may be driven not by starvation but by a healthy appetite may be hard to swallow, but it also might be true. Apple may have gone soft, but with this much twitching, they can't be mistaken for playing dead.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
