Sarcasm?
That worked out pretty well.
If not snark, I must disagree. It was a very poor competitive investment which is only justifiable if the gov "cornered" MS into making it over anti-trust.
That worked out pretty well.
If not snark, I must disagree. It was a very poor competitive investment which is only justifiable if the gov "cornered" MS into making it over anti-trust.
The best scenario would be a niche-player Apple. In personal computers, it still is, but the "post-PC" products it introduced have a good potential of turning Microsoft into a niche-player as PCs go the way of the dodo.
The most likely scenario was that Microsoft would have been broken up, which while it was unwanted by Gates would have likely led to a much more valuable set of combined parts today. Microsoft was the #1 software engineering powerhouse, but they always managed to sabotage their own efforts (force integration where it was detrimental, alignment to a core strategy that often meant that they saw themselves as their biggest competitor, etc).
If Microsoft didn't help Apple, and Apple hypothetically disappeared, today we would likely have a lot more mini-Microsofts in our lives.
It's funny to imagine investing in Apple would yield better results than, say, investing in PocketPC...