Yes, how is it that a company that's been around as long that's a market leader or second place in a large number of market segments can be so valuable? Truly, it's mysterious.
someone who remembers MS being the most valuable company in the world & Apple being on the brink of bankruptcy
To keep them solvent and avoid monopoly concerns. Remember when companies had to worry about that?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-the-lies-the-day-that-mic...
A few months later, Apple added Intel and Microsoft to the action. In later testimony, Apple showed that thousands of lines of "significant programming code" for video acceleration used in Windows came directly from Apple's QuickTime for Windows.
A couple of years go by and the companies were all kisses and hugs for the keynote address to the Boston Macworld Expo.
So, is there any ring of "irony" here as the reports make it sound? Not much to my ears. Microsoft and Intel got their fingers caught in the source code and paid for it. Microsoft hired a larger team of former Apple programers, which didn't help Apple directly, and Microsoft Office returned to being real Mac programs instead of lackluster ports.
Totally remember seeing the video for that and the booing and gasping in the crowd was hilarious.
It was like Lando Calrissian in Empire Strikes back where he tells Han and the group he just made a deal to keep the Empire out for good and then the door opens and there's Vader sitting at the head of the conference table.
He was certainly right. And, in my opinion, if anyone has to learn anything from Steve Jobs's entrepreneurial life, it's exactly that.
- Continued development of Office for Mac for minimum 5 years
- Internet Explorer default browser on Macintosh
- Collaborate on Java
- Microsoft buys $150 million in non-voting shares of Apple at market price.
IIRC, the share price at the time was around $1. EDIT: apparently around $8.25.
Or forced selling off Apple's OS business, which would have been more dangerous to Microsoft if it wasn't tied to a firm that was dedicated to using it to sell hardware, and thus committed to restricting it to first-party hardware.
I'm saying that as someone who loved it so much he literally used it today https://imgur.com/a/zhmi6cP
But the reality was that Apple had failed with Copland and had been shopping around for OSes because their OS was so bad. Apple's other spinoffs (Claris, Newton, Taligent) were also all failures, so there was really no risk that an Apple OS spinoff would get any traction. Even NeXT (the OS X we know today, and the brainchild of Steve Jobs) was on death's doorstep.
Obviously it's not so simple—much of the credit goes to Jobs with the scar tissue of age and experience—but it's also true to say most of the essential puzzle pieces of success existed in one or other of these two companies. Apple had market share, loyal users, brand recognition, Jony Ive, and some good technologies; NeXT had Steve Jobs and a fully fleshed out UNIX operating system with all the trimmings.
a) they released a flashy desktop, or
b) MS/Gates made that investment in them, or
c) some Saudi investor "who always turns companies around" bought a stake.
If MS let Apple die then, and used traditional lobbying to avoid antitrust sanction, iOS might not exist and we'd all be on our Zune tablets.
The significant part of the MS deal was the patent cross licensing and commitment to continue producing Mac versions of Office and IE. Those created certainty in the market about the viability of the Mac platform. The investment was just to cement that commitment and certainty.
I'm sure there was an anti-trust angle, but also Bill Gates just really liked the Mac as a platform and did not want it to fail. He had one in his office at Microsoft from the day it was released.
Apple was on the blink of bankruptcy if they didn't had any outside investment within weeks.
In the 90s, MS attempted mobile devices using Windows CE (based on Windows 3.1—long after the release of Windows 95) and that went nowhere. Microsoft has always been the first for the longest time they were incapable of building things people genuinely wanted to buy.
If Apple didn't make the iPhone or iPad, all MS could do is rip off Blackberry. They wouldn't have made anything worthy of spurring the mobile industry we have today.
And Apple didn't really need that $200M from MS. Instead the investment had more symbolic value—signaling that Apple was still a viable company that had software support from the biggest tech company of the day.
Also, before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, Larry Ellison wanted to buy up shares for a hostile takeover and then install Jobs as CEO, but Jobs talked Ellison out of it.
That's ahistorical. Windows Mobile shipped millions of devices. Their 2007 sales numbers were bigger than the iPhone 1's 2008 numbers.
In probably the biggest blunder in business history Microsoft decided to stop putting resources into Windows Mobile after version 5.0 in 2005. That allowed Apple to catch up by the time of their release in 2008. I've still never seen a good account of why they did that. If Microsoft had continued for those three years they might have been able to hold the iPhone off. Or at least Android.
Mysteriously computers with Linux preinstalled cost the same as Windows computers.
LinkedIn is far more profitable than you'd think.
Azure has sustained double-digit YoY growth for several years.
Even lowly Windows 10 is seeing modest growth.
They don't need to innovate to continue to print money for shareholders. The company is so diverse that they can write off a few billion in loses on, say, a phone division, and still enjoy double-digit revenue growth.
2000-2010 was brutal on Microsoft.
Ballmer was definitely the worst. https://imgur.com/a/Cp4jJDv
Worldwide desktop government use of MS's operating system and office suite is above four nines. The Linux and Apple fanboys can tell you all the governments using their favorite OS as a desktop.
(says the level-headed Linux fanboy)
For the last few years, the companies at the top of the heap have all been consumer-oriented companies, and it's easy to forget that this doesn't necessarily have to always be the case. Microsoft itself is a household name for its consumer software products, so it's easy to think that their rise to the top would _have_ to be tied to consumer products too. From that perspective, these news are a bit of a head scratcher. The Surface line has been successful but not _that_ successful. Windows is as unexciting as always. The XBox isn't really a big thing outside the US.
The NY Times isn't a business-centric publication, so it's pretty much a given that their audience would leave the analysis at this point. The things that make Microsoft enormous are all hidden from their view.
They just aren't SV cool.
IBM is an extreme version of this, and once you’ve outsourced all your R&D, are you really still a tech company?
In my humble opinion, apple stock is way cheaper than any other tech stock atm, when you look at the financials. (I own AAPL and will be buying more)
But still no wonder how it rakes in so much when somehow people can't just give up on using Windows.