I was around at the time, I remember it well, and this is entirely orthogonal to my point. My point is that they couldn't buy a company like Apple and do as wel

I was around at the time, I remember it well, and this is entirely orthogonal to my point. My point is that they couldn't buy a company like Apple and do as well as Apple did being independent. Had they bought all of Apple in 1997, Apple would not exist today. Microsoft would probably be doing a lot better due to the lack of a competitor, but you never know, Jobs might have founded another company and be killing Microsoft with it. My post is about management, not stock picking.