[unclewalter]

I didn’t see anything in the email that suggested they were agreeing to partition the market. Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. Office. Who would? Office is awesome and it’s not Apple’s wheelhouse. ClarisWorks would need massive resources to compete. They were just being transparent that they weren’t in the business of serious Office-suite-like development. The rest of the points seemed like they were quid-pro-quo decisions that could potentially give customers a lot of value: QuickTime support on MS machines, Microsoft developing IE for Apple (and Office)... in this context, Apple is talking to Microsoft as a software package provider, Apple needs partnerships with these companies so their OS can get traction.

[dccoolgai]

"Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. "

... That's what market partitioning _is_ though, right?

The two parties could independently come to the conclusion that Apple shouldn't compete with Office, but actually discussing it (and documenting the discussion!) is a flagrant violation of U.S. anti-trust laws.

[mdavis6890]

Apple probably also did not want to compete with Michelin w.r.t tires either.

Partitioning the market is when you, well, partition the MARKET, meaning divide up potential BUYERS of your product with some other company selling a similar product, so that your company is effectively a monopoly within the subset of buyers that you were allocated.

[dccoolgai]

So the buyers for office software may have had two options, but after this deal there was effectively a monopoly with both potential subsets of buyers left with only MS Office as a choice... This reads like the definition of a monopoly from a school textbook...