[jusben1369]

Hey BugBrother. MSFT could have a) Settled and written a check for $500 mil and b) stopped supporting Office on the Mac the next day and it's likely Apple would be a business school case study about how you fall into the ashes.Back at that time the only people using Macs in the corporate environment were talented people buried away in the marketing department doing unique design work. They were the only people who were tolerated by corporate IT (and then often begrudgingly so) And the only reason they could even keep using their Macs in this Windows XP world was because they could at least exchange Word/PowerPoint and Excel docs from the 98% of the employees using Windows. Add to that all the independent and small consulting shops who had to accept Office Docs from their corporate clients. MSFT's support for Office on the Mac was lukewarm at best leading up to this. Mac users lived in real fear that at any point MSFT would simply drop support for the Mac. It would have been a deathblow. A few hundred million for some code infringement (and it would only have been that based on the dynamics you list) would have simply forestalled the inevitable.

[BugBrother]

You're changing the subject after your wild claims are shown to be trivially wrong?

But ok, I can comment:

As was noted in my first reference, there were non-published money amounts also paid by Microsoft. So they did pay more.

Microsoft were busy using their monopoly to kill the browser competition at the time, see the IE part of the deal, so going for Apple right then was probably not in the cards. Mostly, Msoft illegally (according to legal results) murdered just one major enemy at a time -- and got bad legal problems even then.

[BugBrother]

I could also note, re your claims about Office and corporate environments, that there were virtual machines that ran Windows and Office.

An anecdote:

One infamous Word/Excel version (6 iirc?) ran faster on emulated Windows using a different processor architecture than as an application. (I have never trusted a Microsoft product since then -- you never know when paying the strategy tax will rape functionality you depend on.)

But you almost certainly knew this.