HOW BILL GATE SAVED APPLE COMPUTER
“Sometimes, competition isn’t always the way to win.”
Microsoft and Apple were rivals, competing fiercely to be in control of the PC market. Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple and Bill Gates the founder of Microsoft were both friends, bitter rivals and cautious allies at the same time. Both have openly mocked and criticized themselves with lots of lawsuits filed against each other’s business organization.
In 1997, Apple was going bankrupt and this was going to be a huge win for Microsoft if that ever happened. Guess what? Bill Gate came to the rescue! He injected US$150 million investment in Apple. This investment was a shock as people expected Bill Gate to take advantage of what was going to be the failure of Apple. Bill Gate also gave Apple an assurance that Microsoft will support Office for Mac for five years.
Times Magazine featured Steve Jobs’ appreciation to Bill Gate for saving Apple.
In a presentation, Jobs told his audience “We have to let go of a few notions here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft needs to lose.”
Meanwhile, before this cash injection, Microsoft was faced with antitrust fights that was affecting it’s perception. This was largely as a result of it’s promotion of IE (Internet Explorer) over Netscape and the bundling of same as default browsers in their PCs.
After salvaging Apple, they were able to change the narrative and appear more like a fair player and healthy competitor. Apple also dropped it’s lawsuit against Microsoft and gave Bill Gates non-voting shares of Apple.
Several years later, Bill Gate sold his shares in Apple which had exceed US$2 billion dollars from US$150 million. Bill Gate proved that you can be a fierce competitor and still be a kind man. When Steve Jobs died, Bill Gate said in a tribute,
“Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors, and friends over the course of more than half our lives,”
Today, the competition has taken other shapes. While they still compete fiercely against each other, Both Microsoft and Apple have other competitors to worry about with Apple leading in terms of market capitalization which is currently US$2.48 trillion while Microsoft is $2.435 trillion.
