Steve Jobs negotiates Apple's deal with Microsoft (1997)
techemails.com
techemails.com
Here's one from 2020:
>Microsoft held approximately 18.1 million shares in Apple at the time it started selling them. Since then, multiple stock splits have taken place: one on a 2-for-1 basis on February 28, 2005, and one on a 7-for-1 basis on June 9, 2014. This means those 18.1 million shares would have been 253.4 million shares as of today.
Multiply that by the current stock price of $503.43, and the result is a whopping $127.5 billion stake.
https://thenextweb.com/news/microsoft-once-owned-a-chunk-of-...
However, accounting for that last 4:1 split, Microsoft's 18.1 million shares would now be 72.4 million shares at the last closing price of $165.35.
Worth watching for the crowd reaction: https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=1714
The booing was about Microsoft. It's hard to explain how much Microsoft was both loathed & feared by a lot of the tech industry, particularly Apple loyalists. In modern terms, his would be akin to Biden, at the DNC, announcing collaboration with the NRA.
Later testimony in the United States v. Microsoft Corp. case revealed that, at the time, Apple was threatening Microsoft with a multibillion-dollar lawsuit over the allegedly stolen code, and in return Bill Gates was threatening the cancellation of Microsoft Office for Mac.[2][3] In August 1997, Apple and Microsoft announced a settlement deal. Apple would drop all current lawsuits, including all lingering issues from the "Look & Feel" lawsuit and the "QuickTime source code" lawsuit, and agree to make Internet Explorer for Mac the default browser on the Macintosh unless the user explicitly chose the bundled Netscape browser.
Definitely an underrated movie.
> Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on the 1984 book
:thonk:
Though apparently there are editions from 2000 and 2014, which are quite some gaps. Dunno yet what's included in them.
Apple was closer to death in 2001 than people remember. Losing Office would have been bad. The iPod was a real deus ex machina.
Of course even if they had dipped below 3m that doesn't guarantee Microsoft would have pulled full Office support. They would have had the option, but the deal only ran for 5 years from 1997, so it was almost over anyway and they would still have been committed to minor point updates. If they did have a major update in the works at that time for release in the last year of the deal, it would have been so far along in development it might not have made sense to cancel it anyway. Especially if it had already been announced.
[0] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...
The project failed and all that came out of it was some valuable text and internationalization patents, and OTLC is the name of the holding company for the patents.
"David Boies, attorney for the DoJ, noted that John Warden, for Microsoft, had omitted to quote part of a handwritten note by Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, in which Anderson wrote that "the [QuickTime] patent dispute was resolved with cross-licence and significant payment to Apple." The payment was $150 million. "
two major consumer OS providers working on Java. Java is still big today. it make you wonder how Sun Microsystems with technologies like Java, SPARC, Solaris, MySql...etc. can run so bad that it got bought out by Oracle.
Sun’s basic playbook was to give everyone nice, cheap software and sell them the pizza boxes. This almost worked great during the dot-com boom. And then we got Linux running on commodity PCs for servers, and people were using Windows on commodity PCs for workstations.
In hindsight, they lost. I don’t know we can blame them for losing. It didn’t seem like they made clearly bad business decisions (Commodore) ignored new markets (Blockbuster) or got kind of run into the ground (Yahoo).
For many years, Sun refused to provide the TCK to certify Apache Harmony as an official Java (donated to Apache by Sun's erstwhile foe, IBM[1]).
Sun's official version of Java was nor open source then,so Linux distros had limited options for open-source Java compilers, and their actions cannot be justifiably called sabotage.
Incidentally, Android tooling was initially based on Apache Harmony.
1. Many years later, I read an angry missive by someone at Sun who alleged that Eclipse (the IDE) was maliciously named by IBM. I never would have guessed it, but Sun/IBM were frenemies then.
Are you implying that GCJ was any more certified than Harmony? Because I would be surprised if it was, quite sure the TCK license was only opened up a bit when it became necessary to allow verification of OpenJDK derived implementations.
> had limited options for open-source Java compilers
As in none. They didn't have any options. So they fell back to GCJ, which could have been viable with significant time and effort. Instead it was still missing significant functionality even after OpenJDK was released, at which point it was too late.
I just realized how short the time between GCJ being able to run eclipse (2004) and being obsoleted by OpenJDK (2007) was, I somehow managed to set up enough new systems in that time frame to remember starting eclipse and realizing it was running on top of gcj as significant annoyance.
No I am not. I am, however implying GCJ was as uncertified as Harmony, meaning they were seen as somewhat equals, despite Harmony's superiority (IMO). The situation would have been very different if Harmony had been officially blessed as Java, but I understand Sun's reluctance in cutting off its own revenue stream
> As in none.
GCJ and Harmony were the most well known Free/open source Java (the language) compilers, and were the choices available to distros that do not promote proprietary software. These, as you stated, were not Sun-certified Java™ due to the TCK situation - but they could compile java projects well enough.
- DEC - Sillicon Graphics - Sun
And they were all overtaken by cheap PCs becoming more powerful and Linux OS becoming stronger
Also to note Oracle was the only company that actually bothered to make a proper acquisition offer, everyone else was getting ready to watch it crash and burn.
Apple would not be alive today if they hadn't tried to squeeze the giant.
This, coupled with antitrust action against Microsoft, created a more diverse tech ecosystem and opened the gates for Google, Apple, and others.
It needs to happen again against today's giants. We need more companies doing more things, not the same giants with overlapping markets soaking up all the capital through platform rent seeking.
Even if Apple hadn't gone to court, Microsoft would have had an interest in keeping Apple alive. The lawsuit wasn't the reason why they invested - the anti-trust investigation was; and perhaps as some say Bill had a bit of a soft corner for Apple.
Borland had an office suite and a bunch of developer tools that competed with Microsoft.
I guess the Apple investment turned out better. Borland is long gone.
I used their development tools growing up and they were regarded as best in class at the time, similar to Jetbrains products.
Then it feels like the company slid into oblivion.
Quick googling shows it may have rebranded to Embarcadero now? or been purchased - it is unclear, but it looks like Delphi and C++ Builder still exist as products?
https://entwickler-konferenz.de/de/
To this day Microsoft hasn't been able to match Delphi's workflows for AOT deployment (they killed .NET Native), nor C++ Builder (they also killed C++/CX).
> Delphi's workflows for AOT deployment (they killed .NET Native), nor C++ Builder (they also killed C++/CX).
Specifically in this context what is ".NET Native"? Just the period where they started favoring .NET vs real compilation* - and honestly I never used C++ Builder to think my views or experience of it as a product are super useful for anyone interested in them.
My original "real" language was Delphi, and I basically stopped with Delphi 4 I think? (this was a long time ago) - I recall there being a bunch of reasons, but the core fast is that I simply stopped using it.
* I personally think as a VM and runtime .net is pretty great, however back then I was using inline assembly for terrible performance stuff and losing that was very sad.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/dotnet-native/
Basically what .NET v 1.0 should have been all along, had Ext-VOS project not decided to go after Java (using J++), and then eventually adopt COOL, turning it into C# and CLR.
C++ Builder allows for Delphi like development, or VB like if you prefer, while having access to the whole C and C++ ecosystem.
Only matched for a brief time period by C++/CX, but WinDev mutiny managed to kill it.
Both are still available on UWP workloads, specially since WinUI 3.0 and WinAppSDK are limping along, so regardless of the community talks, maybe in two years they reach feature parity if they don't lose focus.
So regardless of the official message, Windows 11 and 12 most likely as well, depend on plenty of UWP code.
Cheers for the detailed response.
'ping me' was already in use in 97 :o.
>can they really be nimble and agile enough to come up with the next big thing?
Evidently, yes
https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/n5m5vz/oc_airpo...
Steve Jobs called Warren Buffett to ask him what should he do with the extra cash, Buffett told me to give it back to shareholders but Steve would not do that because he was paranoid that Apple might need the cash someday in the future if they have similar situation like they did in the past.
If the equity stake is 5% or more, they have to report every transaction to the SEC, and when that filing became public, the headline would be “MICROSOFT IS SHORTING APPLE!” and would lead to at least a short term decline in Apple stock. So Jobs’ suggestion is that they either take a 4.99% stake that dispenses with all reporting requirements, or forego hedging for 9 months.
Not only that it gave Microsoft inroads into OSX though Office and Internet Explorer. The deal had Bill Gates fingerprints all over it and it could have turned out very differently had Apple not innovated itself out of it's poor financial position.
Who knows what would have happened if Apple hadn't recovered, I think this was much less of a lifeline rather than Bill wanting his software on Mac hardware.
> Apple will agree to pay Microsoft any sums it receives from OTLC derived from a patent settlement with Microsoft.
Oh, yes. Java was "the future of programming" back then.
Even Microsoft has turned into a good Java citizen, given the market relevance.
Safari wasn’t released until 5 years later.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...
Too bad the whole thing was a casualty after Microsoft decided it had won the browser wars.
You had Netscape (Firefox didn't exist then) which was _super_ slow, or you had IE for Mac which didn't use Trident so had its own version of IE incompatibilities. Neither had a native UI, and Mac was a second class platform for both of them (as in IE for Mac was not a priority for MS, clearly Mac was important to IE for Mac. Although as I recall the IE for Mac engine is what formed the base of the mobile ie due to better memory usage, and mobile browsing was still not considered "real" internet in that period so the incompatibility with IE was presumably less important)
I think Safari was more about guaranteeing a native browser on the Mac. There was a lot of speculation they'd adopt Camino, they hired its lead developer, but instead went with KHTML.
I'd guess they didn't want to be tied to Mozilla after watching Netscape flail around for so long. KHTML was so much lighter than Gecko as well with far less baggage to work around.
Camino was (is?) a Cocoa wrapper around Gecko, an engine for which OSX was a second class target, that steadfastly refused to use native components for basic UI (to this day there are basic OSX behaviors that gecko seems to struggle with), and was certainly not generically embeddable in other applications - Safari came with the WebKit system framework remember.
OmniWeb was similarly nowhere near the level of compatibility with real web content, and while obviously made by a Mac centric company, couldn't be used as a system component.
KHTML then has additional advantages - lower memory footprint, better responsiveness, designed specifically to be a component that could be embedded in arbitrary apps and used for non browser purposes.
I think Apple going with KHTML was a better idea than buying out another browser. They got a nice small baseline to build on rather than a lot of legacy code to refactor. Had they gone with Camino I doubt they could have gotten Gecko running on the original iPhone.
CyberDog was built on OpenDoc which had its own set of problems.