Bill Gates and Warren Buffett recently met with students at Columbia Executive Business School. A student asked Bill Gates what he thought of what Steve Jobs had done at Apple since his return.
I believe that Bill and many others overstate the poor state of Apple’s financial health at the time, but it was true that Apple was headed down hill. Gil Amelio, then CEO of Apple realized that something needed to be done to reverse the trends. They had to modernize their OS. They had the options of buying NeXT or BeOS. It appears that they chose well.
Microsoft’s investment in Apple and their announcement of continued development of Office for Mac certainly speeded up the process by expanding faith in Apple’s survival.
Here is the video from CNBC:
