I had planned to write this week what I like to think is a clever column about Microsoft, looking at the company and its products in a very different way, but that will just have to wait another seven days. Instead, I just have to write about Apple Computer and this week's product announcements at MacWorld. It seemed like everyone was surprised to see so much new stuff from Apple. I know I was surprised. The economy is down, Apple is supposedly sitting on excess inventory, the most we were expecting was maybe another consumer gizmo like the iPod. Then Apple dropped two notebook computers and a couple of very significant applications on the show floor, and I was both delighted and amazed. The notebooks are nice, but what floored me were the applications, not only for what they are, but also for what they mean to the company and the PC industry. This is Apple sticking it to Microsoft.

Ever since Microsoft BASIC replaced Steve Wozniak's Applesoft BASIC in the Apple II, Apple has been dependent on Microsoft. The GUI license Apple granted Microsoft that allowed them to use a trash can in Windows 1.0 came about strictly because the Apple II BASIC contract was about to lapse and Microsoft threatened to take its BASIC and go home. And there is more: Microsoft's entire international expansion in the early 1980s was financed — according to Steve Ballmer and former Redmond sales VP Scott Oki — by payments Apple made to Microsoft for Apple III applications. That Microsoft is in India today comes down to a 20 year-old computer that wasn't even successful and that most people don't even remember.

It was more of the same in the Macintosh era. Microsoft was begged to write applications for the Mac, to provide languages, and eventually a web browser. The biggest result of that one-sided collaboration was Microsoft Excel 1.0 — a fabulous spreadsheet that was totally unlike any Microsoft product before. What few people don't remember, however, is that the price of Excel was Apple cancelling its own spreadsheet project called Mystery House.

Mystery House was a spreadsheet, intended to kill VisiCalc — the original spreadsheet program that made the Apple II such a success — because everyone who worked on Apple II software decided en masse that they hated Terry Opdendyk, president of VisiCorp, and wanted to hurt him by destroying his most important product. There was no real business reason to do Mystery House, just spite. The spreadsheet was written by Steve Wozniak and Randy Wigginton, and was a follow-on to Woz's first spreadsheet, called VisiCrook. VisiCrook was an illegal copy of VisiCalc (hence the name, get it?) that defeated VisiCalc's copy protection. But VisiCrook went somewhat further since Woz "fixed" a few of Bob Frankston's math routines and while VisiCrook looked like VisiCalc, it was vastly faster. Enough nostalgia — Mystery House was cancelled because it threatened Microsoft.

The story goes on and on. Apple feels it needs Microsoft, Microsoft demands a pound of flesh, and Apple gives in. Most recently this happened with web browsers as Microsoft periodically threatened to drop Internet Explorer for the Mac. And they probably should have dropped it, too, since the Macintosh product was the fatal flaw in their "IE is just a part of Windows" legal strategy of a couple years ago. I took great pleasure at that time in asking Steve Ballmer what part of Windows was Internet Explorer for Macintosh?

So the fact that Apple would this week introduce its own web browser was not only a surprise, it was a shock. And the Apple browser, called Safari,isn't some warmed-over Mozilla code, but a brand new Apple product based on KHTML from the KDE project that runs faster than IE or Netscape or even Opera, the usual web browser speed champ. This is a major new application, and it came out of nowhere. More than 300,000 users downloaded Safari on the first day it was available.

Products like Safari are always brewing inside Apple, but like Mystery House, they hardly ever get out. That Safari escaped has as much to do with Microsoft as it has to do with Apple. Relations between the two companies have lately been strained. Microsoft, out from under its Department of Justice legal cloud and feeling once again empowered to act on its corporate paranoia, has been grumbling about pulling Mac IE and about poor sales of Mac Office V.X. But this time, rather than capitulate, Apple has fired back with a world class browser of its own. I like that.

But wait, there's more! Apple also introduced a $99 PowerPoint competitor called Keynote. This presentation program does more than PowerPoint and does it cheaper. It includes QuickTime video and Acrobat printed output, and it reads and writes PowerPoint files so who cares that it didn't come from Microsoft? With Redmond periodically threatening Apple with an end to Microsoft Office for the Mac, this is Apple saying, "We dare you."

A complete office application suite requires a word processor, spreadsheet, web browser, database, and presentation program, so with these new programs and its FileMaker database, Apple already has on sale three-fifths of an office suite. Who is to say that next year Jobs won't announce the other two applications, either of which is frankly easier to make than the applications announced this week?

This isn't ego as much as pragmatism on Apple's part. Mac Office is a profitable product for Microsoft, but not as profitable as Windows Office and not as profitable as Windows Office would be if those pesky Mac users were no longer around. It's the dash for 100 percent market share, the so-called "natural monopoly" that has to appeal to Bill Gates. I know it always did appeal to him back in the days when he habitually talked about becoming a monopoly.

Apple can't count on Microsoft and is tired of kowtowing to Microsoft, so the logical strategy is to replace the Microsoft products that cause so much concern. This is especially important since Microsoft has awakened to Apple's media hub strategy, and is positioning Windows to compete for that business. Normally, it would be crazy to take the game to Microsoft this way, but it is a small game, limited to Macintosh computers, and Apple feels it has no choice. Ironically, Cupertino made exactly the same decision 22 years ago when it shipped seven productivity applications with every Lisa computer. At that time, Apple didn't feel it could rely on outside software developers and today, with the added impetus to find more revenue from each box sold, they have rolled around to the same conclusion.

I only hope it works better this time than it did for the ill-fated Lisa.

Now to the notebook computers, one smaller and one bigger than before. There are two interesting themes here. First, where is the titanium? Having told us that the cool people carry notebooks made of titanium, here is Apple back with an aluminum notebook, which looks like two steps back from either titanium (now shared with IBM, which also makes titanium computers but paints them black so you don't know that) or Sony's magnesium frame. It all comes down to money. Aluminum was always as good as titanium or magnesium for this application, and Apple needed to get some cost out of its computers. Goodbye titanium, probably forever.

The second theme is the idea of replacing your desktop computer with a 17-inch PowerBook. This has more to do with the music business than with the computer business. What do you do when your market is mature and there isn't much new stuff coming along? Get everyone to replace all their vinyl records with CD's! Or get your faithful computer users to once again trade up, this time not only gaining greater utility, but also buying a machine on which Apple makes a bigger profit margin than on any other hardware product..

So that's what is behind these new Apple products. All the pundits said Apple couldn't afford to do any new products for MacWorld, but seen this way Apple couldn't afford not to. But why didn't they put a numeric keypad on that 17-inch PowerBook? Beats me.