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ebw on 21 January 2013
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S.T.A.G.E. said:
kain_kusanagi said:

Microsoft bailed Apple out when they were about to fold. I wouldn't say Apple was the tortoise, in fact I'd say in the early 90's Apple was the hare made too many mistakes and was about losing bad to the tortoise MS. MS was afraid that without Apple they would have anti-trust problems so they bought 49% of Apple which layed the foundation for Steve Jobs to rebuild, refocus, and make a comback. They bought the makers of the iPod, painted their computers cute colors, and switched from their buggy old System 9 OS to the Unix based buggy OSX. Those were apparently the right choices and I'm sure MS wished they handn't helped hold onto a competitor.


If Microsoft bailed out Apple that means Microsoft was the quickest to dominate. The hare would dominate the majority of the race, but eventually the tortoise would get there as long as it took.

This is actually a ridiculous urban legend.

Microsoft bought a measly 7% of Apple ($150 million) in non-voting shares, but this was not the primary financial contribution to Apple's recovery.  The truth is that Apple caught Microsoft with their hand in the patent cookie jar (old habits die hard).  Back then, Office wasn't yet irrelevant for 80% of the world, and Jobs realized that Apple could not afford a drawn out lawsuit, so rather than sue, he negotiated a major multipart deal with Microsoft.  The $150 million investment was just a small piece of it.  There was also a 5-year patent cross-license with Microsoft paying ongoing royalties to Apple (since this amount remained undisclosed, it is rumoured to be much larger than the investment).

By far more significant to Apple was that Microsoft agreed to update Mac Office regularly for the next 5 years (not many people know that a clause in the agreement actually let Microsoft off the hook a couple years early, but they still make a version of Office for Mac today).  This PR value was worth far more to Apple than that token investment.  Meanwhile Microsoft won some concessions from Apple with regard to Internet Explorer and Java (at the time, Microsoft viewed Java and Netscape, not Apple, as the major threats to their hegemony).

Microsoft sold off their shares long ago (some idiots even believe they still own 49% of Apple, which is probably worth more than all of Microsoft now), and Apple mainly stayed afloat during its struggling period by gradually selling off their share of a partnership began in the late '80s that was growing enormously in value: ARM.  Yes, the same processor family that powers iPhones, iPads, 99% of Androids and WinPhones, DS, 3DS, Vita, and Windows RT -- thus arguably the dominant processor on the planet -- was once maybe 40%-owned by Apple (don't have the exact percentage but it was still over 16% in 1999).  Apple used it for the ill-fated Newton and later the not-so-ill-fated iPod.

Ok, random useless computer history trivia time: who knows what ancient line of Apple products actually used a CPU from AMD?  (ATI GPUs do not count.)