Microsoft and Apple are not company names you`d usually place in the same sentence with any measure of comfort, mainly because the companies have vastly different business models and sit on either sides of the operating system fence.

Microsoft has a proprietary approach to its software development and pretty much owns the desktop with Windows, while Apple has based Mac OS X on the BSD varietal of Unix and takes a more blended (open source and proprietary) approach to software.

Apple has also had a rather interesting software strategy over the past two years, bringing low cost alternatives of key pieces of application software to the Mac OS X platform and in doing so, positioning themselves as competitors to many of the Mac OS X developers in the market.