While the story may or may not be true, I cannot believe that Sony would have been able to sell Microsoft on the idea that some of their "PCs" were going to run MacOS. There was a pretty interesting example of how Microsoft responds when ASUS first tried to ship a x86 laptop with Linux as standard. (the EEEPC line) It resulted in a huge flap that spilled out publicly with things like ARM laptops being ordered off the expo floor at CeBIT and Microsoft bringing back a "dead" version of Windows XP for that particular model. But the bottom line was they went all out to keep ASUS from shipping a non-windows Laptop and that was in 2006 or 7. Five years earlier I expect they would have just threatened to pull Sony completely out of the OEM licensing program.
The Microsoft antitrust case was still open. The DoJ and Microsoft proposed a settlement in Nov 2001 which wasn't accepted by the judge until Nov 2002. The last thing Microsoft needed was a brand-new allegation of anti-competitive conduct to blow all that up.
In 2002 there was still significant leverage being applied by MS to OEMs. There were a lot of interesting OSes at the time that were squashed because they couldn't get any installation footprint - http://slashdot.org/story/02/02/19/2226257/be-sues-microsoft...
That's a fair point. It was a bit later, the interesting bit about the anti-trust suit is also good, I could see how Sony could pull it off, but I still don't think they ever seriously considered it.
In February of that year, I bought a Dell Dimension e520n, which came bundled with a copy of FreeDOS. I still own that computer, which has a 1.86ghz Core 2 Duo, and it currrently runs Arch Linux.
