Every once in a while, we get a "How much would Microsoft had made if they had held their Apple stock until now" article.
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.
The booing wasn't so much about IE. Netscape was still the 800lb gorilla when this deal happened.
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.
I didn’t know Microsoft’s commitment to develop Office for Mac had a secret requirement that Apple ship at least 3 million computers annually. I’m pretty sure their sales went below that benchmark level in 2001 — a disaster year when the CRT iMac was stale, the G4 Cube had flopped and Mac OS X shipped unfinished.
Apple was closer to death in 2001 than people remember. Losing Office would have been bad. The iPod was a real deus ex machina.
It looks like they were just barely ok on computer sales in 2001, adding up the quarters their accounts say 3,087k 'CPU' sales for the year[0].
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.
I was wondering what #3, this "OTLC" patent settlement was. I found this PDF, describing the development of a "write once run anywhere" OO C++ system, called Taligent, by an IBM/Apple joint-venture trying to compete with Microsoft: https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc15...
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. "
> Apple's Java engineers feel that the current work being done by Microsoft is not competitive in performance with what Apple has just released. We are very excited to work with the Microsoft Windows Java team
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).
In the 1990's, Sun changed from an engineering-driven company to a marketing-driven company. When marketing takes over a company and starts to monkey with the product, that is the beginning of the end.
With Java their playbook was to sell licenses for the embedded world and that only caused problems for everyone involved. Some Linux Distros ended up actively sabotaging Java with GCJ because of FREEDOM(TM). Various companies where blocking the community process to force a license change. Google ended up stitching together its own mostly incompatible Java but not implementation. Even the move to OpenJDK was used as basis of fear mongering when the licensing of the proprietary JDK was updated.
> Distros ended up actively sabotaging Java with GCJ because of FREEDOM(TM).
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.
> 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]).
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.
> Are you implying that GCJ was any more certified than Harmony?
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.
In my experience Solaris x86 ran great and stable on commodity hardware. AFAIK they didn’t make Solaris free until version 10 came out in 2005, which may have been too late. Or maybe nobody knew x86 Solaris was even a thing :/
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.
To be fair, success of MSJVM wouldn’t have necessarily meant success for Sun. They made it as far as “Extend” and there was a whole lawsuit about it, culminating around the time Windows XP SP1 was re-released as SP1a minus the MSJVM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Java_Virtual_Machine
Small companies need to sue big companies more often.
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.
> Small companies need to sue big companies more often.
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.
As someone who used delphi throughout the transition from borland, to inprise, to eventually getting bought out by embarcadero my perception was always that their management wanted to be in a different business than desktop developer tools and would use the revenue from delphi to “diversify”, while structurally underinvesting in the product and regularly raising its price. It wasn’t necessarily wrong to see desktop development as a dead end, but they failed to make something as great as delphi to replace it, and gradually became irrelevant.
Anders Hejlsberg developed Delphi for Borland and then went on to have significant contributions to C# and then Type Script. That guy is clearly a genius.
They tried to rebrand themselves as being "enterprise" - renaming to "Insprise" or something IIRC - and that immediately alienated their main customer base, couple that with the advent of "good enough" drag and drop UI building for .NET, and the eventual LINQ stuff as well I guess? (never a DB engineer which was a big part of Delphi's fanbase) and it simply couldn't charge the premium it former did.
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?
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).
Sorry, I want to be clear here that this is not intended as a snide/asshole question, what do you mean by
> 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.
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.
Interesting read seeing how focus Steve was. If 5% of Apple was 150M of stock at the time they were worth 3B. Now they’re on their way to being worth 1000x that (and almost crossed that threshold before the market sold off). I think Apple is so traumatized by needing investments to fend of bankruptcy and such that it informs how they price and how they seek to extract every bit of margin and rent they can from every product or service they offer. As a fan who has moved away from the Mac for workstation needs but still a fan of the company for phones and tablets and audio accessories (the AirPods are amazing) I’m a bit dubious of how big they’ve gotten. At some point you get so large that can they really be nimble and agile enough to come up with the next big thing?
> I think Apple is so traumatized by needing investments to fend of bankruptcy
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.
Big companies have lots of assets on their balance sheets. Mostly this is “cash equivalents” like short-term US Treasury debt, or overnight repo agreements. But they also have equity stakes in other companies like the one described here. The cash equivalents don't change in value, but the equity stakes do, and unrealized losses on equity can make their way into the operating statement and ruin a quarter. So CFOs use options and futures to hedge against these risks, by betting that the stock will go down.
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.
Interesting that he just takes it as a matter of fact that they will want to hedge the position. No concern that they're betting against Apple, or not showing commitment, it's just of course they would. That's just business, what he's concerned about is the optics.
People forget that in 1997 Microsoft was in the midst of being targeted for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Apple deal not only helped a competitor (It's argued that Apple was a hardware company and Microsoft a Software company) but it also resolved the lawsuits at the time that Microsoft had infringed on Apples GUI.
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 and Microsoft will announce that they have entered into cooperative development on Java, with the intention of insuring compatibility between their respective Java virtual machines and extending them in some similar directions.
Oh, yes. Java was "the future of programming" back then.
Given its role on Android (even if isn't the real deal), IDEs, distributed computing and IoT devices, pretty much a solid bet for many companies to this day.
Even Microsoft has turned into a good Java citizen, given the market relevance.
Safari happened because the browsers on Mac at the time were terrible.
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)
At Safari's inception there were good Mac browsers. Camino and OmniWeb were capable browsers and Cocoa native. While Netscape and IE of the time sucked on Mac they weren't the only options.
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.
Camino was a good web browser for 2002 and head and shoulders above other options on Mac until Safari was released. Netscape/Mozilla Suite was a dog on the Mac because as you say it was a secondary target. It also had much better performance than iCab or OmniWeb, including much better CSS support. IE had been good but development largely stopped so it had not kept up with the web.
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 an interesting project but not really a great browser, especially compared to Netscape of the time. Same with its e-mail and news reader components. They were just ok at best and fairly memory hungry.
CyberDog was built on OpenDoc which had its own set of problems.
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-...