Slashdot

What happened to the MS/Intel alliance of old? Microsoft getting annoyed at Intel making chips for Apple?

Apple has nothing to do with this, Intel is fairly opportunistic and they see there is a significant potential for Linux growth over the next few years and having Intel hardware be the hardware of choice due to superior driver support can only help them. They have traditionally provided fairly good hardware support for Linux on the server side of things for obvious reasons, it appears that this is now being pushed out to more desktop/notebook oriented hardware. Most likely in anticipation of desktop Linux growth, especially in the corporate/government universe.
As far as a MS/Intel alliance, there has not been one to speak of for several years now. It's not that Intel is above collusion or dirty tricks, for example there was that deal they struck with Skype a while back trying to get Skype crippled on AMD processors. It's just that Intel, and many other hardware companies have felt for years that Microsoft is holding them back.

From Microsoft's perspective they have been in a position where most computer users in the world have to pay them a "Microsoft tax" if they want to or not, so the less things change the better because any radical hardware or usage changes (the internet) can only hurt Microsoft rather than help them. This clashes with the goals of most hardware companies, which are to one-up the other hardware companies and crank out new hardware revisions constantly to keep people in the habit of upgrading every year. Graphics processor capabilities have been advancing at an incredible rate the last few years, this is largely because gamers are constantly looking at upcoming games and thinking to themselves "man I'm going to need a new video card when that comes out". What would be an equivalent event for replacing the rest of the hardware in the computer? Perhaps the release of a new operating system, though this doesn't really work when it takes Microsoft 5 years and lots of delays between each version of Windows with only marginal changes, most of which have scared the corporate/government customers away from upgrading.

There has been bad blood between Intel and Microsoft for many years now, if you want further evidence here is an interview from late 2005 with Avram Miller Intel's "Vice President and Director of Corporate Business Development" from 1984-1999 http://www.pbs.org/cringely/nerdtv/transcripts/008 .html [pbs.org]

Avram:I think another problem was the company was, I think, intimidated by Microsoft. It's easy to be intimidated by Microsoft. Microsoft is intimidating. And I think that many times Intel would have liked to have done something, but Microsoft didn't like it and Intel was basically a little bit afraid of Microsoft.

Bob: I talked to an Intel guy who told me that they were Microsoft's bitch.

Avram: Well, that might be a way to describe it. I wouldn't describe it exactly like that. One of the issues in this was that if you're a software company, you're used to selling upgrades. There really isn't an upgrade for a micro-processor. So, you need to try to push faster and faster the applications that use the power. And in the beginning, the companies were more aligned that way, but over time, they became less aligned that way.

Here is an example from another former Intel executive who testified against Microsoft in the anti-trust trial http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_McGeady [wikipedia.org]

* McGeady testified that Microsoft feared competition from Intel's software development: At an August 2, 1995 meeting Bill Gates allegedly threatened to terminate Windows support for Intel's new microprocessors unless they were able to "get alignment" between Intel and MS on Intel's Internet and communications soft