__/ [ Doug Mentohl ] on Wednesday 28 February 2007 17:07 \__
> From: Bill Gates
> Sent: Friday, June 21, 1997 9:37 AM
> To: Ben Waldman
> Cc: Jon DeVaain; Greg Maffei
> Subject: RE: Moving forward with Mac Office 97
>
> I appreciate your mail, It shows the kind of passion about great
> products that has made Microsoft successful, I admit we have neglected
> the Mac business. Although the Mac is declining if we move ahead on this
> product we should ask for the subs with localized product to make a real
> effort.
>
> I have 2 things I need to understand better.
>
> 1) Realistically when do we think we would ship this product?
>
> 2) Can we avoid Apple knowing how far along we are for the next 30 days?
>
> ?Original Message?
> From: Ben Waidman
> Sent; Friday,June 27, 1997 1:58 AM
> To: Bill Gates
> Cc: Jon Devain; Greg Maltel
> Subject: Moving forward with MacOfficeS?
> Importance: High
>
> I am writing to argue for making a final decision to FINISH Mac Office
> 97, and detach this issue from the current Apple discussions.
>
> The pace of our discussions with Apple as well as their recent
> unsatisfactory response have certainly frustrated a lot of people at
> Microsoft. The threat to Cancel Mac Office 97 is certainly the strongest
> bargaining point we have, as doing so will do a great deal of harm to
> Apple immediately. I also believe that Apple is taking this threat
> pretty seriously, and at least someone there seems to want to move
> forward (when I discussed the issue with Jim Gable, an Apple marketing
> VP who visited MS today, he seemed very concerned about getting more
> details on our specific objections to their latest proposal; also, we
> received mail today from Apple?s evangelism group asking for details on
> the Office Early Adopter Program, saying that exec mgmt had instructed
> them to get these details (participating in this program was one of the
> minor issues in the discussions}).
>
> Regardless of the outcome of these discussions, though, I believe we
> should ship Mac Office 97 Furthermore, I believe we need to decide this
> immediately - our indecision so far has caused quite a bit of harm, and
> this will become far worse very shortly, as we are not only close to
> shipping code externally, but need to finally start press and customer
> communications, especially with MacWorld a month away.
>
> ..
>
> 5) We can experiment with Mac Office
>
> Because Mac Office is so much less critical to our business than
> windows, we have the flexibility to test out new things in the product
> and in its marketing before we try them on Windows.
>
> http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/122106/PLEX0_6060.pdf
Thanks for that. I spread it a little yesterday. Made it into Digg's front
page, then Slashdot...
http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/05/2129253&from=rss
We need to explore these documents... plenty to be exposed.
--
~~ Best wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | "The speed of time is one second per second"
http://Schestowitz.com | RHAT GNU/Linux ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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