[Am-info] Best Buy drops Mac titles?

[Steve Cohen]

Over New Year's Eve I was speaking with a friend who told me that he
tried to buy as Christmas presents, software for the Macintoshes in his
house.  (They are an all-Mac household.)  As he has done before, he went
up to the nearby Best Buy and tried to browse the shelves.  There was no
longer a Mac section nor could he find any Mac titles.  So he asked a
salesman who told him words to the effect of "Yeah, we cut a deal with
Microsoft so we had to get rid of the Mac section."

Now I don't know if I necessarily believe the BestBuy salesman since
BestBuy salesman are notoriously ignorant of just about anything they
sell, but I can tell you this: I walked into Best Buy myself and looked
around.  There was indeed no longer a Mac section.  There were some
titles available for the Mac but only those where the publisher had
released the title with Mac and Windows on the same CD.

Ironically, on one of the most visible racks in the store, I could see
no fewer than three different Linux distributions: RedHat, SuSE, and
Corel.

So what IS going on here?  As well as Linux is doing, I don't think it's
coming close to supplanting the Mac.  The Mac is not exactly looking
like dead meat these days as it may have been a couple of years ago. 
Doesn't seem like a great business move by Best Buy.  

Can anyone else confirm this pattern at the Best Buys near them?  And if
Microsoft HAS cut such a deal with Best Buy, isn't that exactly the sort
of thing you'd expect a company under serious antitrust scrutiny to
avoid?