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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

The irony of (b) is that MS invested in Apple as a way to maintain a semblance of competition to shake of antitrust enforcement, and then Apple ate MS's lunch in whole segments.

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.

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Apple had sufficient capital at that time to execute Jobs' plan, especially since step 1 was to cut most of what Apple was doing.

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 had sufficient capital at that time to execute Jobs' plan, especially since step 1 was to cut most of what Apple was doing.

Apple was on the blink of bankruptcy if they didn't had any outside investment within weeks.

I can see why MS would want to keep Apple alive, but wouldn't the shared ownership raise even worse antitrust fears?

I guess regulators are more tolerant when you're actually trying to save a competitor with a really fair deal, rather than purely attempting a takeover to kill them.

I believe the other regulatory trick that made it work is "non-voting shares". Microsoft had a big monetary stake but was given no proportionate power in the company's board.

Explicitly took non-voting shares to not rattle too much.

No, we simply wouldn't be using tablets or the market would be much smaller.

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.

> In the 90s, MS attempted mobile devices using Windows CE ... and that went nowhere

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.

MS would have probably eaten into iPhone share but not much of Android.

Wasn't MS already in the middle of dealing with antitrust litigation as a result of bundling IE with the system? I can absolutely see them not being able to avoid more antitrust litigation if their only real desktop competitor died.

They were sued by BeOS for antitrust reasons.

Mysteriously computers with Linux preinstalled cost the same as Windows computers.

It wasn't mysterious. The price of a Windows license to an OEM was offset by the money they made adding crapware.

An OEM license for Windows was a few dollars for companies who gave into MS's demands.

Seems like an outcome the authors of antitrust laws would have been happy about right?

Mac users were (and are) a large market for MS Office. It wasn't all about antitrust.

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