What I found so far:
Microsoft picky stuff
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...10/page_01.htm
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa080499a.htm
Windows 1.0 was considered buggy, crude and slow. This rough start was made worse by a threatened lawsuit from Apple Computer.
Windows 1.0 floundered on the market until January 1987
On December 9, 1987, Microsoft released a much-improved Windows 2.0 that made a PC look a bit more like a MacIntosh computer. Windows 2.0 had icons to represent programs and files, improved support for expanded-memory hardware and windows that could overlap. Apple Computer saw a resemblance and filed a 1988 lawsuit ...
In their defense, Microsoft claimed that the licensing agreement actually gave them the right to use Apple features. After a four-year court case, Microsoft won. Apple claimed that Microsoft had infringed on 170 of their copyrights. The courts said that the licensing agreement gave Microsoft the rights to use all but nine of the copyrights, and Microsoft later convinced the courts that the remaining copyrights should not be covered by copyright law.
6/1/93: Microsoft announces that Judge Vaughn R. Walker of the U.S. District Court of Northern California ruled today in Microsoft's favor in the Apple vs. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard copyright suit.
What would have happened if Microsoft had lost the lawsuit? Microsoft Windows might never have become the dominant operating system that it is today.
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...ac/page_02.htm
Quote from Bill Gates in 1983 "To create a new standard takes something that's not just a little bit different. It takes something that's really new, and capture people's imaginations. Macintosh meets that standard."
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...asic-cassette/
Microsoft wrote a Basic compiler for Apple and it was released in 1977. Microsoft was a separate company based in a completely different city. They were never employees. Only third party developers, like some shareware group writing an app for a much bigger company. In 1997 Apple had Intel's backing.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/%7Ehistory/Jobs.html
Jobs and Wozniak managed to earn $774,000 from the sales of the Apple I. The following year, Jobs and Wozniak developed the general purpose Apple II. The design of the Apple II did not depart from Apple I's simplistic and compactness design. The Apple II was the Volkswagon of computers. The Apple II had built-in circuitry allowing it to interface directly to a color video monitor. Jobs encouraged independent programmers to invent applications for Apple II. The result was a library of some 16,000 software programs. [Halliday, 1983, p. 206]
Microsoft was just one third party author of one program, out of 16,000! They were insignificant to Apple in 1977.
http://www.digibarn.com/stories/desk...bushytree.html
Charles Simonyi and most of the BravoX team left Xerox for Microsoft as a group, around about 1982 or 1983. The first version of MS Word, which appeared maybe a year later, was essentially just a port of BravoX to MS-DOS.
http://www.computerhope.com/history/198090.htm
1980-IBM hires Paul Allen and Bill Gates to create an operating system for a new PC. The pair buy the rights to a simple operating system manufactured by Seattle Computer Products and use it as a template. IBM allows the two to keep the marketing rights to the operating system, called DOS.
Microsoft taking someone else's stuff and selling it as their own.
http://www.computerhope.com/history/198090.htm
Microsoft is listed on the New York Stock Exchange selling shares to the public at $21 each, making Bill Gates one of the world�s youngest billionaires.
Microsoft purchases Forethought Incorporated. The company that developed the presentation software PowerPoint.
Again Microsoft doesn't write a thing and just takes someone else's work and repackages it.
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/windows.htm
Microsoft finally announced Windows in November 1983, with pressure from just-released VisiOn and impending TopView.
This was after the release of the Apple Lisa, and before Digital Research announced GEM, and DESQ from Quarterdeck and the Amiga Workbench , or GEOS/GeoWorks Ensemble, IBM OS/2, NeXTstep or even DeskMate from Tandy. The development was delayed several times, however, and the Windows 1.0 hit the store shelves in November 1985. The selection of applications was sparse, however, and Windows sales were modest.
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/serendipities.html
Microsoft became a mogul just because of 6 serendipities. It had nothing to do with Bill Gates, just a bunch of good flukes. Apple made their own success.
Apple picky stuff
Apple released the Apple in 1976 at the Homebrew computer user's club. It was presented as the "computer for the rest of us, average people"
http://www.digibarn.com/collections/...-mac/index.htm
Apple coined the term "the computer for the rest of us/normal users" for the Mac in 1983. Two years before Windows came out.
http://ei.cs.vt.edu/%7Ehistory/Jobs.html
Steve Jobs innovative idea of a personel computer led him into revolutionizing the computer hardware and software industry. When Jobs was twenty one, he and a friend, Wozniak, built a personel computer called the Apple. The Apple changed people's idea of a computer from a gigantic and inscrutable mass of vacuum tubes only used by big business and the government to a small box used by ordinary people. No company has done more to democratize the computer and make it user-friendly than Apple Computer Inc. Jobs software development for the Macintosh re-introduced windows interface and mouse technology which set a standard for all applications interface in software.
Two years after building the Apple I, Jobs introduced the Apple II. The Apple II was the best buy in personal computers for home and small business throughout the following five years
"The personal computer was created by the hardware revolution in the 1970s and the next dramatic change will come from a software revolution", said Jobs. [Halliday, 1983, p.204] His innovative ideas of user-friendly software for the Macintosh changed the design and functionality of software interfaces created for computers. The Macintosh's interface allowed people to interact easier with computers, because they used a mouse to click on objects displayed on the screen to perform some function. The Macintosh got rid of the computer command lines that intimidated people from using computers.
Quickly setting the standard in personal computers, the Apple II had earnings of $139,000,000 within three years, a growth of 700 percent. Impressed with that growth, and a trend indicating an additional worth of 35 to 40 percent, the cautious underwriting firm of Hambrecht & Quist in cooperation with Wall Street's prestigious Morgan Stanley, Inc., took Apple public in 1980. The underwriters price of $22 per share went up to $29 the first day of trading, bringing the market value of Apple to $1.2 billion. In 1982 Apple had sales of $583,000,000 up 74 percent from 1981. Its net earnings were $1.06 a share, up 55 percent, and as of December 1982, the company's stock was selling for approximately $30 a share. [Halliday, 1983, p. 206]
http://www.computerhope.com/history/198090.htm
Apple Computer is the first personal computer manufacture to hit the $1 billion mark for annual sales.
"We have thought about this very hard and it old be easy for us to come out with an IBM look-alike product, and put the Apple logo on it, and sell a lot of Apples. Our earning per share would go up and our stock holders would be happy, but we think that would be the wrong thing to do," says Jobs. [Morrison, 1984, p. 86] The strengths of Macintosh design was not memory, power, or manipulative ability, but friendliness, flexibility, and adaptability to perform creative work. The Macintosh held the moments possibility that computer technology would evolve beyond the mindless crunching of numbers for legions of corporate bean-counters. As the print campaign claimed, the Macintosh was the computer "for the rest of us." [Scott, 1991, p.71]
Apple has always wanted to make the best computers, and not the most. Making the biggest dollars does not make a great company, it only makes it rich. The real richness in life is in creativity and innovation, not in dollars that just sit around doing nothing as if to only stroke a fragile ego. Apple used its ego to do great stuff while Microsoft hid behind it just for money's sake. An empty vaccuous and boring experience that every tries to do. Who wants to live life as a money grubbing clone? -Darcy Baston
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/compu...hbyteinterview
Interview with Mac team on October 14, 1983 :
Atkinson: We want the most computer that you can get for the least dollars so that the most people can have it... and then you can concentrate on making the world�s best software for it.
http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/compu...otherdesigners
Evidence that even in 1980, Mac plans were on the go, 5 years before Microsoft:
BYTE: What year was it?
TRIBBLE: I think it was 1980.
RASKIN: Sounds about right. We already had the Book of Macintosh at that time � 400 pages.
TRIBBLE: And it was an extensive description of a cheap, user-friendly machine that went beyond what was the state of the art then (the Apple II) in terms of a personal computer.
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