10 ms·

Steve Jobs negotiates Apple's deal with Microsoft (1997)

146 points by guiambros 4y ago

sys_64738 4y ago
Apple really was in a dark place at that time and it would have died shortly thereafter but for Steve.
- RachelF 4y ago
  Steve and Bill, ironically.
- randyrand 4y ago
  Bill showed mercy, having already won.
  - nekoashide 4y ago
    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.
shawnz 4y ago
For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" which briefly covers this moment in history.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
  Seconded. Pirates is criminally underrated and the best biopic of Jobs/Gates to date.
  - exogeny 4y ago
    Definitely. I never would have thought that Anthony Michael Hall of all people would have put forth the definitive Bill Gates, but here we are.
- Group_B 4y ago
  As much as I like the movie, I do find it a little bit cheesy. I know it was filmed on a low budget, but the humor in the movie isn't the greatest.
- asxd 4y ago
  Yes! I particularly love this performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ Definitely an underrated movie.
  - shawnz 4y ago
    Agreed, the best scene, hands down. A perfect explanation of the philosophical difference between Apple and Microsoft at the time.
- jakebasile 4y ago
  That TV movie is the first time I thought about becoming a software engineer. It's quite good.
- sbisson 4y ago
  Based on the classic book of computing history “Fire in the Valley”. A recommended read for anyone interested in the history of our industry.
  - aasasd 4y ago
    I was wondering if I should substitute the book for the movie, but then: > Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on the 1984 book :thonk: Though apparently there are editions from 2000 and 2014, which are quite some gaps. Dunno yet what's included in them.
- sumedh 4y ago
  Even Bill Gates has said its reasonably accurate.
- lawgimenez 4y ago
  You kidding me, this movie made me want to become a programmer.
aasasd 4y ago
TIL the ‘Tech emails’ exist in other form than unreadable-on-phone images in Twitter posts.
- buryat 4y ago
  twitter exists on the desktop as well
  - vestrigi 4y ago
    Still horrible to browse and find older posts.
divbzero 4y ago
I didn’t realize Greg Maffei used to be CFO of Microsoft. He now leads part of John Malone’s empire of media and entertainment companies.
reactspa 4y ago
What does "hedging" mean in this context?
- TradingPlaces 4y ago
  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.
  - reactspa 4y ago
    Got it, thanks.
  - simonh 4y ago
    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.
kristianp 4y ago
I assume the cash payment was from Apple to Microsoft? Or was it the other way around, to "rescue" Apple?
- kristianp 4y ago
  Maybe the cash payment wasn't significant compared to the purchase of Apple shares, that's the only thing mentioned in this article, for example: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----the-day-apple-and-microsoft-made-peace https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----...
- gumby 4y ago
  The cash payment was from Microsoft. Apple didn’t have that kind of money at the time.
junon 4y ago
Wow, to think IE was almost packaged along with Macintosh. I wonder if Safari would have happened if it had.
- function_seven 4y ago
  Not sure if you’re joking or not, but IE was packaged that way. Safari wasn’t released until 5 years later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS_X https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...
  - junon 4y ago
    Oh I had no idea, I knew IE was installable on Mac for a while but didn't know it came packaged.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wayne 4y ago
  I remember at the time that Mac IE had a standards-compliant layout engine Tasmin that was better than the one on Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(browser_engine) Too bad the whole thing was a casualty after Microsoft decided it had won the browser wars.
- olliej 4y ago
  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)
Anechoic 4y ago
Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company 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.
wayne 4y ago
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/hc15/2_Mon/grimes.pdf 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.
- astrange 4y ago
  ICU (a popular Unicode library) came from Taligent, though it’s been through at least one total rewrite.
- rasz 4y ago
  https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/ https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_... "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. "
andrekandre 4y ago
> Apple will agree to pay Microsoft any sums it receives from OTLC derived from a patent settlement with Microsoft. what is OTLC in this context?
- blackoil 4y ago
  Likely to be "One Time License Charge". MSFT paid one time for perpetual license of all patents.
- testplzignore 4y ago
  Object Technology Licensing Corporation
dominotw 4y ago
> Please ping me to let me know that you received this email. 'ping me' was already in use in 97 :o.
- badkungfu 4y ago
  The ping has been around since '83.
  - codingdave 4y ago
    The ping has been around since submarines started using sonar.
echelon 4y ago
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.
- jeswin 4y ago
  > 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.
RachelF 4y ago
At the same time as this Apple deal, Microsoft also invested around $100M in another semi-competitor, Borland. Borland had an office suite and a bunch of developer tools that competed with Microsoft. I guess the Apple investment turned out better. Borland is long gone.
- CSMastermind 4y ago
  Does anyone know the inside story of what happened to Borland? I used their development tools growing up and they were regarded as best in class at the time, similar to Jetbrains products. Then it feels like the company slid into oblivion.
  - olliej 4y ago
    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?
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Not only do they still exist, there is a job market for them in Germany, and an yearly conference. https://entwickler-konferenz.de/de/ https://entwickler-konferenz.de/de/ 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).
      - olliej 4y ago
        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.
MangoCoffee 4y ago
> 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.
- klodolph 4y ago
  MySQL was an acquisition. 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).
  - josefx 4y ago
    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.
    - sangnoir 4y ago
      > 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.
Lammy 4y ago
> Apple will publicly announce that […] it will make Internet Explorer the default Worth watching for the crowd reaction: https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=1714 https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=1714
- TMWNN 4y ago
  The Onion on Gates negotiating with Apple: <https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-1819564663 https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...>
- octocop 4y ago
  People have disliked internet explorer since the dawn of time it seems
  - wdr1 4y ago
    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.
gigatexal 4y ago
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?
- unsignednoop 4y ago
  >(the AirPods are amazing) >can they really be nimble and agile enough to come up with the next big thing? Evidently, yes https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/n5m5vz/oc_airpods_revenue_vs_top_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/n5m5vz/oc_airpo...
- sumedh 4y ago
  > 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.
GeekyBear 4y ago
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. https://thenextweb.com/news/microsoft-once-owned-a-chunk-of-apple-heres-what-it-would-have-been-worth-today https://thenextweb.com/news/microsoft-once-owned-a-chunk-of-...
- maattdd 4y ago
  You missed the 4:1 split in August 2020. If the rest of the calculation is correct, the value of those 18 millions stock would be almost 500 billions
  - GeekyBear 4y ago
    That article was written just a few days before the last 4:1 stock split took place, so it's just a snapshot in time. However, accounting for that last 4:1 split, Microsoft's 18.1 million shares would now be 72.4 million shares at the last closing price of $165.35.
viktorcode 4y ago
> 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.
- epolanski 4y ago
  It wasn't a wrong assertion looking at the following decades.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  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.
pavlov 4y ago
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.
- simonh 4y ago
  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. [0] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/a/NASDAQ_AAPL_2001.pdf https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...
WillAdams 4y ago
An interesting contrast to this is a previous negotiation that of Microsoft acquiring MacBASIC: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt

146 points by guiambros 4y ago

sys_64738 4y ago

Apple really was in a dark place at that time and it would have died shortly thereafter but for Steve.

RachelF 4y ago
Steve and Bill, ironically.
randyrand 4y ago
Bill showed mercy, having already won.
- nekoashide 4y ago
  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.

shawnz 4y ago

For those who haven't seen it, I highly recommend the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" which briefly covers this moment in history.

halfmatthalfcat 4y ago
Seconded. Pirates is criminally underrated and the best biopic of Jobs/Gates to date.
- exogeny 4y ago
  Definitely. I never would have thought that Anthony Michael Hall of all people would have put forth the definitive Bill Gates, but here we are.
Group_B 4y ago
As much as I like the movie, I do find it a little bit cheesy. I know it was filmed on a low budget, but the humor in the movie isn't the greatest.
asxd 4y ago
Yes! I particularly love this performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFcb-XF1RPQ Definitely an underrated movie.
- shawnz 4y ago
  Agreed, the best scene, hands down. A perfect explanation of the philosophical difference between Apple and Microsoft at the time.
jakebasile 4y ago
That TV movie is the first time I thought about becoming a software engineer. It's quite good.
sbisson 4y ago
Based on the classic book of computing history “Fire in the Valley”. A recommended read for anyone interested in the history of our industry.
- aasasd 4y ago
  I was wondering if I should substitute the book for the movie, but then: > Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on the 1984 book :thonk: Though apparently there are editions from 2000 and 2014, which are quite some gaps. Dunno yet what's included in them.
sumedh 4y ago
Even Bill Gates has said its reasonably accurate.
lawgimenez 4y ago
You kidding me, this movie made me want to become a programmer.

aasasd 4y ago

TIL the ‘Tech emails’ exist in other form than unreadable-on-phone images in Twitter posts.

buryat 4y ago
twitter exists on the desktop as well
- vestrigi 4y ago
  Still horrible to browse and find older posts.

divbzero 4y ago

I didn’t realize Greg Maffei used to be CFO of Microsoft. He now leads part of John Malone’s empire of media and entertainment companies.

reactspa 4y ago

What does "hedging" mean in this context?

TradingPlaces 4y ago
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.
- reactspa 4y ago
  Got it, thanks.
- simonh 4y ago
  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.

kristianp 4y ago

I assume the cash payment was from Apple to Microsoft? Or was it the other way around, to "rescue" Apple?

kristianp 4y ago
Maybe the cash payment wasn't significant compared to the purchase of Apple shares, that's the only thing mentioned in this article, for example: https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----the-day-apple-and-microsoft-made-peace https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/08/06/august-6-1997----...
gumby 4y ago
The cash payment was from Microsoft. Apple didn’t have that kind of money at the time.

junon 4y ago

Wow, to think IE was almost packaged along with Macintosh. I wonder if Safari would have happened if it had.

function_seven 4y ago
Not sure if you’re joking or not, but IE was packaged that way. Safari wasn’t released until 5 years later. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS_X https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...
- junon 4y ago
  Oh I had no idea, I knew IE was installable on Mac for a while but didn't know it came packaged.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wayne 4y ago
I remember at the time that Mac IE had a standards-compliant layout engine Tasmin that was better than the one on Windows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(browser_engine) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(browser_engine) Too bad the whole thing was a casualty after Microsoft decided it had won the browser wars.
olliej 4y ago
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)

Anechoic 4y ago

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company 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.

wayne 4y ago

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/hc15/2_Mon/grimes.pdf 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.

astrange 4y ago
ICU (a popular Unicode library) came from Taligent, though it’s been through at least one total rewrite.
rasz 4y ago
https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/ https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_... "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. "

andrekandre 4y ago

> Apple will agree to pay Microsoft any sums it receives from OTLC derived from a patent settlement with Microsoft. what is OTLC in this context?

blackoil 4y ago
Likely to be "One Time License Charge". MSFT paid one time for perpetual license of all patents.
testplzignore 4y ago
Object Technology Licensing Corporation

dominotw 4y ago

> Please ping me to let me know that you received this email. 'ping me' was already in use in 97 :o.

badkungfu 4y ago
The ping has been around since '83.
- codingdave 4y ago
  The ping has been around since submarines started using sonar.

echelon 4y ago

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.

jeswin 4y ago
> 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.

RachelF 4y ago

At the same time as this Apple deal, Microsoft also invested around $100M in another semi-competitor, Borland. Borland had an office suite and a bunch of developer tools that competed with Microsoft. I guess the Apple investment turned out better. Borland is long gone.

CSMastermind 4y ago
Does anyone know the inside story of what happened to Borland? I used their development tools growing up and they were regarded as best in class at the time, similar to Jetbrains products. Then it feels like the company slid into oblivion.
- olliej 4y ago
  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?
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Not only do they still exist, there is a job market for them in Germany, and an yearly conference. https://entwickler-konferenz.de/de/ https://entwickler-konferenz.de/de/ 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).
    - olliej 4y ago
      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.

MangoCoffee 4y ago

> 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.

klodolph 4y ago
MySQL was an acquisition. 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).
- josefx 4y ago
  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.
  - sangnoir 4y ago
    > 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.

Lammy 4y ago

> Apple will publicly announce that […] it will make Internet Explorer the default Worth watching for the crowd reaction: https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=1714 https://youtu.be/IOs6hnTI4lw?t=1714

TMWNN 4y ago
The Onion on Gates negotiating with Apple: <https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-1819564663 https://www.theonion.com/microsoft-patents-ones-zeroes-18195...>
octocop 4y ago
People have disliked internet explorer since the dawn of time it seems
- wdr1 4y ago
  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.

gigatexal 4y ago

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?

unsignednoop 4y ago
>(the AirPods are amazing) >can they really be nimble and agile enough to come up with the next big thing? Evidently, yes https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/n5m5vz/oc_airpods_revenue_vs_top_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/n5m5vz/oc_airpo...
sumedh 4y ago
> 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.

GeekyBear 4y ago

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. https://thenextweb.com/news/microsoft-once-owned-a-chunk-of-apple-heres-what-it-would-have-been-worth-today https://thenextweb.com/news/microsoft-once-owned-a-chunk-of-...

maattdd 4y ago
You missed the 4:1 split in August 2020. If the rest of the calculation is correct, the value of those 18 millions stock would be almost 500 billions
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  That article was written just a few days before the last 4:1 stock split took place, so it's just a snapshot in time. However, accounting for that last 4:1 split, Microsoft's 18.1 million shares would now be 72.4 million shares at the last closing price of $165.35.

viktorcode 4y ago

> 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.

epolanski 4y ago
It wasn't a wrong assertion looking at the following decades.
pjmlp 4y ago
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.

pavlov 4y ago

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.

simonh 4y ago
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. [0] https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/a/NASDAQ_AAPL_2001.pdf https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive...

WillAdams 4y ago

An interesting contrast to this is a previous negotiation that of Microsoft acquiring MacBASIC: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=MacBasic.txt