Microsoft paid $150 million, not $250 million. And Apple had $1.2 billion in cash at the time, so they weren't on the brink of bankruptcy, just headed that way.

Microsoft paid $150 million, not $250 million. And Apple had $1.2 billion in cash at the time, so they weren't on the brink of bankruptcy, just headed that way. It looks as if Apple would have won its patent infringement case against Microsoft, since there were thousands of lines of quicktime code found in Windows media player (probably added by mistake, but even so...). That was a smart deal by Apple, dropping the infringement suit, because Microsoft pledged to develop Office for Macs. No Office, no Mac sales to businesses. There was a time when Macs couldn't open Word .doc files, not with formatting intact, so it was an incredible barrier to communication.