Again? Twice in one night that myth is trotted out. Good Grief.
Just factual.
Uncommonsense? I am sorry but I don't see even common sense. So far, YOU have produced no facts at all.Like I said earlier evening, this MYTH is like the hydra... it keeps popping up and if you lop off a head, two more pop up.
What you posted is male bovine exrement.
Apple had $1.4 BILLION in cash and another $400 million other liquid assets in when Microsoft was forced to settle a patent and copyright infringement lawsuit that Apple had brought against them that could have cost them many times that amount.
Apple allowed them, in a series of three interlocking contracts, to save face by buying $150 million in Apple Preferred Stock. Microsoft also was required, by the terms of the settlement, to License from Apple, for an undisclosed yearly amount, the Quicktime software copyrights and patents they had mis-appropriated from Apple. In addition, Microsoft agreed to continue development and marketing of MS Office for Mac for an additional five years. MS was also required to relinquish to Apple, licenses for some of their intellectual properties in perpetuity at no cost to Apple.
For its part, Apple agreed to drop the lawsuit and include MS Internet Explorer for Mac on its new computers and distribution disks for a period of five years... along with Netscape Communicator.
My, my, that looks like Microsoft LOST this lawsuit, BIG TIME, doesn't it.
. . . $150 million cash infusion 1997. This was on the heals [sic] of Jobs being fired...
Jobs was ousted from Apple the company he co-founded and built, not for mis-management, because he was not CEO, just Chairman of the Board, in 1987, TEN YEARS BEFORE the lawsuit settlement. He was fired because of a management dispute with CEO John Sculley. History has proved Jobs was right, Sculley wrong.Since Jobs had had nothing to do with the management of Apple for 10 years, any financial straits that your mythical Apple history has afflicting the company was not, as your assertion implies, due to Jobs' lack of management skills—it is demonstrably the failure of a line of three incompetent CEOs who did not have vision.
Apple bought NeXT for $400 million dollars from Jobs—hardly a "tanked" operation—and, in an admission of their error of ten years before, placed Jobs back on the Board of Directors of Apple. On Gil Amelio's resignation, Jobs became interim CEO. Since that elevation, Apple's Stock has risen over 2000%. . . the number two greatest increase/period on the Stock market.
You also completely ignore Jobs 1986 purchase of Pixar for $10 million—a mere pittance, from George Lucas—which he then turned around and sold to Disney for $6 BILLION. . . and essentially took over Disney.
I went back and looked at Apple's 10K/Q reports, cash flow statements, etc. from '95/6/7. Apple was hemorrhaging badly. It's easy to mask major problems with FASB cash flow statement methods vs. the UCA cash flow method.
The $1.2 B in cash you quoted is a legally permissible number to report as "cash", but it's no better than accounting alchemy to use for calculating the capacity to pay obligations or service debt (but it's easy to dupe shareholders with). Apple didn't have anything close to $1.2 billion available to "run the business" (let's see if you can pay engineers or vendors with depreciation). They were about as financially strong as GM was last fall.
Cash from operations was sagging badly. The rating agencies had Apple appropriately rated at junk bond level. Apple was loosing market share, loosing money, losing employees, and they were concerned that developers would abandon their platform for the more lucrative MS OS's (read it in their own words in their SEC filings).
Apple was walking around with a tin cup looking for money to pay back their accrued "technology debt" (lack of proper / effective investment in product R&D). They got a major infusion from a certain Saudi Prince for instance. They also got $150 million from Microsoft. No where in any of their SEC filings did I see this mentioned as a settlement for copyright or patent violations. Material items such as the receipt of money for a huge IP settlement should be reported in an SEC filing. It was a straightforward cross license agreement according to all the published facts - mainly so Apple could get the latest MS Office suite released on the MAC so market share wouldn't erode further - causing an even greater 3rd party development exodus. This is according to internal emails that I read, which were published from recent court documents on antitrust litigation. There is evidence that Microsoft wanted to clear up an issue with Apple's Quicktime code from a contractor that got used by Intel for Microsoft, but no evidence that the $150 million was a settlement. I submit that there is more evidence that Apple was broke, needed cash, needed a competitive OS, plus needed Microsoft's business apps - then there is evidence that the $150 million was given to Apple as a settlement. Show me the smoking gun and I'll retract this analysis.
As for Job's NeXT Computing venture - they were utterly defunct. The way you spin it as a major Steve Jobs success story is worthy of a DNC press statement praising Obama's great accomplishments since taking office. Jobs failed to build a competitive, sustainable business with NeXT. He didn't learn his lessons from Atari or his first stint at Apple - that he's no genius when it comes to hardware. With Apple, he steadfastly clung to total design and manufacturing control over the hardware and OS. If he had been a little less myopic in this area, he would have thrown everything into porting the Mac OS to the Intel platform ahead of Microsoft's anemic Windows wrapper around DOS, and Jobs / Apple would have owned the desktop future - crushing Microsoft's primary profit engine. But, Jobs was obsessed with total control of the platform stack - including going to war against commodity hardware manufacturers where everyone but Steve Jobs could plainly see they could never win the battle - and it cost him his job and almost bankrupt Apple. He seemed to sober up some at the end of NeXT by sustaining a multiplatform strategy, but right now, I see Jobs / Apple making some of the same old mistakes with their hyper-proprietary iPhone/Tunes products. That's a major reason I don't want an iPhone. I'll go with Android before I'll commit to an iPhone (except, I won't discount the fact that there could be some good money to be made by developing the right, trendy app for the iPhone).
The fact that Apple grossly overpaid for NeXT Computing is no surprise (basically paid $400 million in '97, big bucks, for a nicely packaged free Unix OS, OO development tools - wrapped with a Mac GUI). Mismanagement of M&A happens all (if not most) of the time and in this case, it only proves
1) Apple had an uncompetitive OS, it needed a replacement, and they didn't have the time / ability to build it, and
2) Apple had crummy upper management who didn't know how run a profitable company, design an advanced OS, or value an acquisition.
These observations are not my opinions, they are well sourced historical facts from a time when I was steeped in pioneering globally distributed systems, massive object-relational data warehouses, building wireless mobile computing solutions, and some of the first SaaS products over the Web.