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Comment by Bubble_Pop_22 | Hacker News Reader

Without the DOJ lawsuit, 3 things off the top of my mind:

Apple would not exist.

Google would not have android as part as their Berhshire Hathaway-esque portfolio of technologies/companies. They'd have still beaten Microsoft in the search engine business.

Somebody would have killed Bill Gates or at least tried to, like it has happened with many POTUS. The person who is perceived as #1 will get all sorts of lunatics after them. (You could argue that is a safety system that nature installed in humans in order to avoid one person to monopolize decisionmaking) . Kinda like a more severe and irrevocable DOJ.

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The DOJ lawsuit had nothing to do with Apple existing. The measly $250 million investment didn’t “save Apple”. Apple turned around and used $100 million of that to buy out PowerComputing’s Mac license.

for older people in the industry the comment was clear to understand it was about Microsoft not being able to kill the iphone and consequently macs by simply forcing verizon and ATT to not sell the devices effectively, like they did on the PC business.

I don’t think they get too much older than me…

But MS had absolutely no leverage on the phone carriers. By the time the iPhone came out, Apple was riding high because of the iPod. Verizon didn’t accept Apple’s terms until they started losing customer to AT&T.

As I understand it, Verizon initially refused the iPhone, probably due to Apple's requirements of unmetered data and selling unsubsidized phones at full price, so the iPhone launched exclusively on Cingular/AT&T in the US.

I'm not sure what leverage Microsoft would have had over AT&T or Verizon to block the iPhone.

Apple’s terms were no carrier installed bloatware and they get to update their own phones.

My recollection of the time was that it was the port of Microsoft Office that made Apple viable as an alternative operating system (which was a result of the DOJ pressure, and not because Bill Gates was feeling charitable). Without office compatibility, you were locked out of all business communications.

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint were first available on the Mac in the mid 80s and had continuously been updated.

> The measly $250 million investment didn’t “save Apple”.

Yes it did, but not in the way you're thinking.

Microsoft's investment into Apple and devotion to a dev team to port Office to Mac OS was what re-instilled developer confidence in the platform.

If you recall, Apple had $2 billion in cash and had just spent $500,000,000 on NeXT. The $250,000,000 investment helped ease the burden, but it was Microsoft standing behind the platform that really saved it. Same reason the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be Year Never... developers don't develop for Linux Desktop because they have no faith in the platform one day becoming a huge market dominating offering that could share the spotlight with Windows and Mac OS.

And for the pedantic people out there, when I say "developers don't develop for Linux Desktop", I - obviously - mean developers of consequence. There is no Microsoft Office for Linux Desktop. There is no Adobe Creative Cloud Suite for Linux Desktop. I can keep going. The major players - the ones that matter - don't waste their time with it.

Microsoft didn’t port Office to Mac after the agreement. They agreed to continue supporting Mac.

Microsoft Excel was first introduced for the Mac in 1987. Word was first introduced in 1986. PowerPoint was originally a Mac application that was acquired by MS.

In fact, MS always had a Mac team. Bill Gates was on stage with Jobs at the introduction of the first Mac.

I had Excel and Word back in 1992 on my Mac LCII. Of course it was pirated. They were like $300 a piece.

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