It's not just heavy investment at their moment of need, it's also a habit of nurturing unlikely Plan B's for years and decades. - When Apple founded ARM in 199

It's not just heavy investment at their moment of need, it's also a habit of nurturing unlikely Plan B's for years and decades. - When Apple founded ARM in 1990 with Acorn and VLSI, they didn't know that silly cacheless chip would become a world-beating juggernaut. But hey, as founders, they now have a license to mold the microarchitecture however they like. - When Apple bought NeXT in 1997, they didn't know the sun was slowly setting on PowerPC. But they secretly nursed along the (already built) NeXTSTEP x86 port for years, until the time came to dust it off and start shipping product with Intel Inside. - When Apple forked KHTML in 2001 and started building WebCore/WebKit, they didn't know that MS was about to leave Internet Explorer to wither on the vine, nor release the final Mac IE only 2 years later. But they quietly invested in building such a konquering (sorry!) product that (with Google/MS help) we're now at risk of an entirely different browser monoculture.