skingers

Mike Wuerthele said:

sflocal said:

magman1979 said:

I'm stunned and dismayed that a site like AppleInsider, even in the year 2018, continues to peddle the falsehood that Bill Gates was Apple's saviour! This has been debunked OVER and OVER again, and is a blunt LIE that was peddled by mainstream media in the late 90's whilst Apple was in dire straights.

Please REMOVE the phrase "and one-time savior of Apple" from the opening statement, it's a blunt and proven lie!

Apple and Microsoft were battling due to MS' infringement of Quicktime codec.  Apple was also very close to losing it all.  While "Savior" may be a bit melodramatic, I don't expect anything less from the media (including AI) to fluff pieces and claim "that's what everyone does".  

The reality is that Apple really needed that $150m to prevent going under.  Call it whatever you want, but that money did keep Apple afloat long enough for Steve Jobs to set a clear and profitable course.

In no way is it a lie, or a "fluff."

Like it or not, there is no question that the money, the development deal to make sure that Office (and Internet Explorer!) remained on the Mac, plus the cessation of the QuickTime lawsuit saved Apple's ass.

No, Magman is correct.  This was not some kind of altruistic side of Microsoft or even an action designed to provide good "optics".  It was a settlement for a lawsuit where Microsoft was caught red handed stealing code from quicktime.  

Here's an article that describes what actually happened, written some 20 years closer to the actual event.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_150m/

"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."

No, Microsoft did not choose to "save" Apple, it was settlement for stolen quicktime code, plain and simple.

crowley said:

skingers said:

danox said:

9secondkox2 said:

Great news. Bungie benefits and gamers benefit.

Bungie is an insanely great developer these days. Perhaps the single best house on the market.

Great buy. 

Hardly, nothing but crap will come out of it….The state of gaming is the same as Music, Movies, and TV most of it bad……game play has died, picking your kids allowance ie…the parents credit card is the only thing happening these days…..

Really cannot agree with this.  Sony first party games like The Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn, and God of War have been some of the best games and story telling within games ever.  Bungie as part of the Sony stable is great news for them and gaming in general. 

From reading more about this, it’s being framed as a technology purchase, that Sony want to invest big in “online, live service” games. That’s a very different prospect from the other first party games you mention, and not an area I’m interested in at all.  Could well be lucrative for Sony, but I don’t know that it’s good news for gaming.

I do agree with you here.  The fact that they get one of the biggest ever MMO and FPS franchises of all time is gravy, very smart acquisition for Sony.

I don't believe this story.  Jobs was the guy that Killed Mac clones and made OSX upgrades free.  Money grubbing by putting his baby on the beigest of beige boxes just does not seem consistent with his demonstrated record.

Interesting article.  Under Ballmer/Gates I would have said "no way" but this is a different MS now.  They care more about the cloud and their apps running on everything now more so than the user OS.  The article is right, they have no viable portable platform now, iOS and Android dominate and are more important than desktop or laptop OS instances now.  The Windows OEM business is actually worth much less in terms of revenue than just the Mac business alone and is utterly dwarfed by iPhone and iPad.  End point IS dying for Windows and with it being a diminishing part of MS revenue their focus is going to be "azure, office 365 and Xbox in the cloud for all" more so than protecting a shrinking user OS share.

Wow, this is an Onion article surely.

red oak said:

“Four Giants”.   Lol

Apple is literally 50% of BH now.  

Apple is 50% of the holdings in their equities portfolio of Brk yes, but the biggest part of their business by far is the subsidiaries they own outright.  They are a massive conglomerate of businesses that made net earnings of 90 Billion last year.  Apple paid a total of 14.5 Billion in dividends to all stockholders so Brk would have seen about 785 Million of that in 2021 for their stake.  Since they did not sell any Apple stock in 2021 that means that 89.2 Billion came from non-apple elements of Brk.  So 50% of the stocks portfolio yes, but nowhere near "50% of BH".