In the promotion of his new book, Michael Dell has been talking about a 1997 conversation wherein Steve Jobs asked Dell to license Mac OS. The timing seems suspicious. Why would Jobs be actively shopping Mac OS licenses in the same year he was killing off the only licensing business Apple ever had? From Connie Guglielmo, at CNET:

Jobs and his team had ported the Mac software, based on Next’s Mach operating system, and had it running on the Intel x86 chips that powered Dell PCs. Jobs offered to license the Mac OS to Dell, telling him he could give PC buyers a choice of Apple’s software or Microsoft’s Windows OS installed on their machine.

And more importantly…

Jobs suggested he just load the Mac OS alongside Windows on every Dell PC and let customers decide which software to use — and then pay Apple for every Dell PC sold.

In 1997, two of Steve Jobs’s biggest challenges at Apple were driving users and developers to a new NeXT-based OS and increasing revenue. This deal would have helped with both, especially with revenue. Dell was just two years away from becoming the world’s largest PC maker so getting a cut of every computer sold by the company would have been substantial, to say the least. Michael Dell would have been a fool to agree to it. Dell knew it, and I’m pretty sure Jobs knew it too.