For Apple, what a difference a decade makes
The sentiment expressed in the title of this article is indisputable. However those of us who were around in those days remember the happening a little differently than what is reported in the body of the article.
The story originally appeared in Computerworld, and it has been reprinted by MacWorld on their web site.
On August 7th, 1997, many people thought that Apple was about to go out of business. Even though in truth, they had a large surplus of short time investments and had just cleared out a large inventory in the stores so that the rebound could begin. Although it was a year later that the iMac was introduced and the true rebound began.
The article says: "When Macworld ‘97 took place in Boston, Apple was a mess. ... Jobs had started the process of killing off the Newton and clone operations at Apple. The company was nearly bankrupt and had lost its direction."
I can't dispute the actions being taken by Jobs, but I do dispute that "Microsoft was bailing out Apple with a $140 million cash infusion that at the time represented more than 5 percent of the company’s resources." In truth, Apple made the deal to show the world that the Mac was still a viable platform. Microsoft purchased non-voting stock to show that they had faith in the Mac and in exchange Apple dropped a number of lawsuits that would have been embarrassing during those anti-trust days at Microsoft. Of course Microsoft later sold the stock for a nice profit, although not as much if they still owned it today.
"Microsoft got plenty in the deal, too. At the time, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was trying to usurp Netscape as the Web browser of choice, and a major component of the Apple deal was to make IE the default browser on every new Macintosh system."
Apple did make IE the default browser and probably regretted it. As the Woz says, it was really buggy and caused more problems with the OS than any other application. (See the book iWoz for details.)
Of course, the best part of this being posted on MacWorld is the comments that it gathers, which is probably why it was posted there. I am sure that Jason Snell and Chris Breen know their history better than this writer.
Read the article and comments
here.
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