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Comment by brenns10 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. The money is there to ensure that there's an independent browser option to point at, if there's ever any question about lack of competition. But the products are all designed to behave worse on Firefox, to help keep usage in the single digit %s.

Reminds me of Microsoft saving Apple back in the day. It's cheaper to prop up your competitors to avoid becoming a monopoly, than it is to become a monopoly and get broken up. Of course ideally, you don't want to support your competitor to the point of them actually becoming competitive, just enough to have deniability.

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Microsoft never “saved” Apple and this myth needs to die.

Microsoft invested $250 Million in Apple after it already had a multi billion line of credit.

On top of that, Apple turned around and the same quarter spent $100 million to buy out PowerComputings Mac assets. It was three years and much more than $150 million in losses later that Apple became profitable.

And that $250 million was also partially to settle a lawsuit over Microsoft stealing QuickTime source code for its own media player. This is separate from the look and feel lawsuit.

Interesting, I admit to never studying that history and only hearing the story as told by others after the fact!

There is a lot of narrative being built around Apple = good, Microsoft = bad. I, as an Apple aficionado, had to learn the truth piecemeal and understand that there really is a reality distortion field around Apple. You can't really trust much of what the fanboys will say. They say anything to make Apple look good and save face. I believe it comes from the cognitive dissonance of buying hardware that is so much above competitive market price, there is a need to build a lot of stories about moral superiority and things like that.

You said a lot without showing one citation where I said something that was factually incorrect…

Because I agree with you? I don't know where you got the impression I said you were wrong...

I call this Mozilla being Google’s antitrust beard. However, just like Apple playing that role for Microsoft, and AMD playing that role for Intel (if I remember correctly), it could be possible for Mozilla to transition back into being a true competitor to Google.

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