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Compare to something like Microsoft's Kin Phone. Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platfo

Compare to something like Microsoft's Kin Phone. Microsoft paid half a billion dollars to buy Andy Rubin's company, Danger. They decided to rewrite the platform from Java to Dot Net, which took so long the product was no longer competitive when they finished. Then they spent a fortune to advertise a product that was canceled after two weeks. Then Microsoft decided to take another huge pile of cash and set that on fire by purchasing Nokia's mobile phone business. > Microsoft wasted at least $8 billion on its failed Nokia experiment https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766540/microsoft-nokia-acquisition-costs https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766540/microsoft-nokia-... Researching a potential product and deciding not to go ahead with it is nowhere near the same order of magnitude on the monetary waste scale.

pjmlp 4y ago
Well to compare Apples to Apples we would need to know how much money Apple has spent with many of those efforts, which before Jobs came back almost driven the company to bankruptcy. For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, as those boxes were to be sent away.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  We don't have to wonder with Microsoft. Again and again they have paid billions of dollars for complete failures like the Surface RT and Windows RT. They would have been well advised to cancel the platform before spending a fortune on advertising and unsold inventory. Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams. They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.

pjmlp 4y ago

Well to compare Apples to Apples we would need to know how much money Apple has spent with many of those efforts, which before Jobs came back almost driven the company to bankruptcy. For younger generations Apple might feel unstoppable, meanwhile I remember the discussions to migrate away from surviving Macs on our IT department, and my graduation thesis was porting a particle simulation engine from NeXTSTEP into Windows, as those boxes were to be sent away.

GeekyBear 4y ago
We don't have to wonder with Microsoft. Again and again they have paid billions of dollars for complete failures like the Surface RT and Windows RT. They would have been well advised to cancel the platform before spending a fortune on advertising and unsold inventory. Hell, how much did they pay for Skype, despite already having several text and video chat clients of their own? Then they completely rewrote Skype before replacing it with Teams. They have a longstanding habit of taking shareholder value and creating huge bonfires from it.