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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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The same reason MS saved Apple in the late 90s.
That's a common misconception. Microsoft paid Apple so they would drop a lawsuit that accused Microsoft of stealing concepts and ideas from Apple's MacOS and putting them into Windows. Which was ironic because Apple had stolen them from the Xerox Palo Alto research lab previously. Gates anecdotally told Jobs "Steve, it's like I broke into a house to rob it and found out you'd already cleaned out the place".
But it was Apple not Xerox or Microsoft that had put those concepts on the market first and they would've had a strong case. So Gates paid for it to go away and also arranged some cross licensing so it wouldn't happen again.
Was that really a good decision? I mean, would the Government have broken MS up had Apple gone to sh*t?
It was Bill hedging his bets. The antitrust case against MS was huge and scared them shitless. They had seen what had happened to Bell Telephone.
Yes, it allowed Apple to survive and become what it is today.
But, MS was not broken up.
Not even Microsoft. They sold off their Apple assets cheap and actually lost money with them
Developers, developers, developers, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS (old Balmer meme)
Wasn't it Ballmer's big push for online services like cloud that allowed MS to grow so much beyond Windows?