According to an interview with former Sony President Kunitake Ando, during a 2001 golf trip to Hawaii, Steve Jobs surprised him and his team with VAIO laptop running on Mac OS X. It’s no secret that Steve Jobs at the time shared a passion for Sony and was known to be close with Sony’s co-founder Akio Morita. In fact, after his return to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs attempted to model parts of Apple, including factories and their now iconic stores, after Sony. While the story might sound too far fetched, besides his admiration at the time for Sony, Steve Jobs and his top lieutenants were known to go to Hawaii once a year for a retreat where they relaxed and freely bounced ideas between one another. As we now know, the partnership never came to be, with Sony turning down the proposal but the facts around it might be even more intriguing than the reasoning.

According to Ando, the engineers at Sony had just finished optimizing the VAIO line for Windows and saw OS X on VAIO as a diversion of resources and were “opposed [to] asking ‘if it is worth it’.” To further add to this odd turn of events, Sony was approached by Apple four years prior to Steve announcing at MacWorld that OS X had been living a double life and was transitioning from Power PC to Intel, which VAIO computers ran on. While this makes the whole affair harder to believe, it also points out the admiration Jobs had at the time for Sony.

It’s of course impossible to peg how this would have changed Sony’s fate, as they are currently looking to sell off VAIO, or Apple’s who has famously kept their technology internal, opting to building their own software and hardware which as history has shown, has worked out pretty well for them. Years later, Kunitake Ando would join Steve Jobs on stage at MacWorld to announce a partnership which would see Sony’s line of Cyber-shot and Handycam camcorders gain iMovie compatibility. Since that time, Apple has dominated many of the markets that Sony once led in, including computers, phones, and portable music players.

Discuss:

While hard to predict, do you think that, if Sony had moved forward with Apple as a partner, the company that stands before us today would be radically different?