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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

It wasn’t a bailout. The monetary amount was only $250 milllion. Apple turned around and spent $100 million the same quarter to buy out Power Computing’s Mac license.

A net $150 million wouldn’t make or break Apple even then.

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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.

Office was available for Macs before it was available for Windows. Word for Mac came out in 1984, Excel in ‘85 and PowerPoint in ‘87

Office for Windows didn’t come out until 1990 and it wasn’t very popular among PC users.

Microsoft promised to continue developing Office for Mac.

How can you be so sure about that? Many otherwise very viable companies go bust because of current account issues. $250m is a lot of current account.

Well, you can be sure about that because Apple kept losing money for the next three years. The net $140 million wouldn’t have covered half of thier losses for a quarter.

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