Great analysis. I will note that however much money MS lost or made on the deal, the value of maintaining a customer platform (for Office) and keeping a competitor alive (at a time when the antitrust thing loomed) was probably priceless.
Maybe at the time Microsoft saw Apple as a dying company that would never recover from their early to mid-90s blunders, so throwing it a bone would have seemed like a no brainer at the time.
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Great analysis. I will note that however much money MS lost or made on the deal, the value of maintaining a customer platform (for Office) and keeping a competitor alive (at a time when the antitrust thing loomed) was probably priceless.
Maybe at the time Microsoft saw Apple as a dying company that would never recover from their early to mid-90s blunders, so throwing it a bone would have seemed like a no brainer at the time.
Absolutely. And now Microsoft MacBU makes a killing from developing Mac software (some estimates put it at $350 million [http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/06/24/microsoft_expa... ]). (Thanks, by the way!)
Don't forget that it included an IP sharing agreement, which was no doubt worth more than $600 mil given what Apple had to share.