Managing Mac Détente in the Microsoft Megalopolis

Sssh…we have a secret: Despite the high-drama mudslinging on bulletin boards across the Internet, Microsoft and Apple are BFFs. Would your iBook be as useful if it didn’t run Word? Would the iPhone be as resounding a success if iTunes didn’t run on a PC? In the final analysis, Windows users—not Mac users—may be the most important block of iPhone, iPod, and iTunes customers that Apple has.

As Apple strives for an ever-increasing slice of the digital-technology pie, it must spend more time shaking hands and palling around Microsoft—and the end result is win-win, with increased market share for both companies. Hence Microsoft’s Macintosh Business Unit, which counts among its ranks Kurt Schmucker, senior Mac evangelist.

“The Mac Business Unit is an internal Microsoft group, but it’s very independent,” Schmucker says. “We talk to customers directly, we manage our own budget, and we deliver the product ourselves.” They even have a cavernous bunker—the Mac Lab—lined with every Mac ever produced, so they can test their software and, you know, feel all Apple-y.

We live in that world of having the Mac, loving the Mac.

As members of the largest Mac software development team outside of Apple itself, the MacBUers flock to Mac Expo like fanboys and fangirls, haunt Mac user forums (so your exhortations that “Microsoft sucks!” might have reached the right eyeballs), and even send anthropologists into Apple-centric homes to watch users, from unboxings to full software integration. And you’ll be interested to know an identical unit at Apple performs the same function, making sure Safari runs on Vista and eyeballing the latest version of Office to make sure the Aquafication works just right.

As for their daily computing lifestyles, the MacBUers hit the Apple sauce nearly 24/7. “We use Macs to get our work done every day,” Schmucker says. “We live in that world of having the Mac, loving the Mac, needing it to be compatible, and taking it from there, to think about where we can make the most difference in customers’ lives.”

So what’s coming down the pike? That’s another thing Microsoft and Apple have in common: tight lips. We do know they’re in the middle of a massive hiring initiative, but Schmucker won’t say what for, beyond “the next version of Office.” Very mysterious, guys. We’ll wait and see—and maybe do a little underdog-rooting for that lovable John Hodgman.

Delivering Triple-A Gaming with the Touch of a Finger

Thanks to its SDK and Apps Store offerings, the iPhone has emerged as a transformative product. Lying somewhere between the ultimate smart phone and the slimmest, most portable notebook, the iPhone represents an entirely new computing platform—a platform that just so happens to offer powerful, novel, and endless opportunities for handheld gaming.

Enter Electronic Arts, the BMOC of Triple-A videogame publishers, as well as the largest Triple-A publisher to make a serious play in the mobile games market. Whoever figures out how to dominate the iPhone gaming landscape will be an influence-wielder of enormous proportions, and in his capacity as vice president of Worldwide Studios, Travis Boatman is EA’s iPhone overlord.
“The combination of a great device, a great software stack and development tools, and the iTunes storefront is like three stars aligning,” Boatman says. “It’s really driving the rest of the market to chase Apple.”

The big news here, of course, is EA’s Spore, perhaps the most hotly anticipated computer game of 2008. To Boatman, a truncated version of Spore was a great fit for the iPhone and iPod touch. “What we learned right away was that it’s great to use the touchscreen to play with the Spore creatures—move stuff around with your fingers, drag with the eyes, paint with your fingers, and have fun with it.”

In the coming year, the iPhone and iPod touch will demand development of games that skew differently from the Sony PSPs and Nintendo DSes of the world. Hence the games that EA has released (or announced) thus far: Tiger Woods, The Sims 3, SimCity, Yahtzee, Monopoly, Scrabble, and Tetris, among others.

All these titles are geared toward a broader (read: more female, less pimply-faced) market, and mesh well with the touch interface. As Boatman told us, “You can’t use the touchscreen for a lot of the action games, because if your fingers obscure the scene when you’re trying to play an action game, you can’t.”

It’s really driving the rest of the market to chase Apple.

Thanks to the App Store—which Boatman credits with having as much innovative power as the iPhone itself—EA’s releases can be distributed and played as soon as they’re ready. And though Boatman won’t say what’s coming next (yes, we asked about Tiger Woods, and, no, we couldn’t charm him into betraying a timeline), EA’s mass-market franchises are sure to bring touch-interface gaming to the limelight.

Next, Walter Mossberg and David Pogue