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Apple News

H

hinkhous

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 25, 2001
40
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If you are interested in an Apple branded PDA in the future, you may be interested in the following article...

http://www.appleturns.com/scene/?id=3407

After reading the article, I found out some interesting information regarding Apple, Palm and Handspring financials, which would make any deals possible.

Apple - $6.8 Billion Market Cap, $4.3 Billion Cash

Palm - $2.2 Billion Market Cap, $321 Million Cash

Handspring - $713 Million Market Cap, $77 Million Cash

Basically what the figures show is that any merger between Palm and Handspring would create a company with a market cap of no more than $3 billion. With that in mind, Apple COULD theoretically issue a stock swap or purchase the newly formed PalmSpring (or HandPalm !! :) ) with cash assets. Interests piqued?
 
very interesting indeed

now may not be the time to buy a three in one deal, like the article mentioned, because you know who owns 10+ percent of apple and he is in some monopoly trouble right now and he has come into some bad blood with palm and handspring

remember that 80s thing called the SEC? well they are still here and the dynamics of the whole apple buying one which owns the other two but is partially owned by that redmond devil looks like a field day for the SEC

i am no tax lawyer but a friend of mine liked to challenge the SEC with VC tendencies and he is now in a "different country right now and may call one day and say hello" yeah right!

it's not like buying a batch of bananas at the grocery store and the more i read the register, the more i laugh...but it is a very interesting read nonetheless

the register takes me away to places i thought i can never be and one day they will be right...some of my appleinsider.com diehards think that of us though so i guess that is why they call these things chatrooms

[Edited by jefhatfield on 11-21-2001 at 03:49 AM]
 
Are you sure

Jef,

You've mentioned this 10+ percent figure before.

According to Apple's press release:
http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1997/q4/970806.pr.rel.microsoft.html
Microsoft invested $150 million in non-voting Apple stock. I can't find a precise figure for Apple's market cap in '97, but from the look of it's share price back then I'd say it was around $3.5 Billion - which puts Microsoft's investment in Apple at no more than 4%. Unless Microsoft has made an additional investment in Apple which I'm not aware of.

I don't have a deep understanding of US anti trust law - in the UK was have something called the "Competition Comission" instead, but I would assume that the US authorities regarded Microsoft's investment in '97 as being in the public interest, since it promoted consumer choice and ensured the future of the only alternative desktop operating system. Without Microsoft's backing at that key point, Apple would have almost certainly folded. I think it's therefore likely that you could make a case for Apple's purchase of Palm as being equally in the public interest.

Whether Apple should be Palm however is another matter - personally I think it would be suicide. The Palm platform is in serious trouble and the OS will have to be rewritten from the ground up - hence their purchase of BE. On the subject of which - I can't imagine Jobs ever welcoming Jean Louis Gasse back to the fold! He almost managed to break Apple last time.
 
10 percent

here is what i know

i took a semester as a tax law grad student and clerked at a cpa firm and it only made me more confused on securities issues...so here is my non-expert opinion on the issue

the real info on this is not public domain as you have found out

when i was an mba consulatant for a dot.com in san jose, i was chosen as the person to talk to paul allen, co-founder of microsoft (assuming we would get that far) and i could have asked him and blown our business deal ;-)..but that is a long story...

but after my stint as a suit in the IT field, i hated it and wisely became a tech and my first boss, a certified tech who now works for household credit, was the one who told me it was 10+ percent and considerably more, if you know what i mean

i don't think he can quote exact numbers and still keep his job

i know that the other apple investments microsoft made were anti-climactic and did not generate a whole lot of press and as far as i know, the dollar amounts were not known

at the time of apple's troubles and "bg" coming in, the company had posted a quarter with a billion dollar loss and their cash reserves were a quarter away from financial ruin

the 150 mil, while not a huge amount in the valley, was used as a leverage device to gain more control than if you , me, and 100 others simply went down to schwab and put down 150 million as an unrelated group of individual investors

voting stock and non voting stock is not the issue here as much as leverage for a bleeding almost dead company

steve goes to bill's house for dinner and do you think bg has a few gentle suggestions...would you if it were your 150 million from your company?

it took two things to save apple

1) the bold leadership of steve jobs
2) bill gates' timely investment

before i get into stupid HBS case study bs about the matter, think of it this way...

you are in game seven of the world series, one run down in the bottom of the 9th inning, and someone gets on base followed by a home run...game over...you win...champagne and happy endings to massages, etc.

an entire season saved by one guy hitting a two run homer

a two run homer is not that much in and of itself but in the bottom of the ninth in game seven of the world series, that swing of the bat is, for that moment in history, the entire season

well, that is kind of what happened with bg's 150 mil

in a nutshell, the man took advantage of apple and steve had to, like the movie said, hail bg as the second coming

bill hit a two run homer when we needed it and the perks he generated from it are ones we will never know as long as bg and sj are alive

you know i wish it was not so, but any first year business student can tell you that leverage is very important and bill gates, like him or hate him, is the 20th century's master of that game

for fun, see the movie "other people's money" with danny devito or "wall street" with michael douglas...now that's leverage baby!

you are a marketing guy...steve is the sizzle but gates is the steak, rather, an 800 pound side of angus!!!!

one day the us govt may turn him into hamburger since i think bg with all his power has taken on mad cow disease!

and foocha, congrats in advance on your full member status!

[Edited by jefhatfield on 11-21-2001 at 11:50 AM]
 
Interesting

The kind of support that I think was more significant from Bill was the commitment to develop Office for Mac. Also significant was MS's agreement to tolerate QuickTime. Microsoft's renewed commitment to the platform was more signification than their reletively small financial investment. The main price Apple had to pay was the agreement to make Internet Explorer the main browser. Personally I think it was the best browser anyway.

Not much of a triumph for Microsoft - why would they care about the tiny percentage of Mac users in their browser wars against Nestcape? They were in a sticky spot at the time regarding anti-competative activities, and Apple was putting the boot in with their QuickTime gripes. Bill's $150 million bought him out of a lot of hot water and got him some good PR for a change.

Gil Amelio claims it was he rather than Job's who negotiated the framework of the MS agreement, and Job's only took over the final negotiations when he ousted Amelio. I've read other sources that support this claim. The MS deal has proved to be a good one for Apple, and was perhaps the best thing (and only thing?) that Amelio ever did for the company .
 
wow, that is interesting so i give a kudo to gil

he also supposedly pushed the concept of the G3 processor, not a bad thing in hindsight

i hate ms ie, netscape is better but ms office for mac is cool even though i don't like to admit it

i also like flight simulator and what i have seen with xbox is really cool, too
 
Netscape better?

I hesitate to ask this question, but... here goes.

Do you really think Netscape is better, even now?

Netscape is very pedantic with code, where IE is better at interpretting sloppy code. Netscape has limited scripting capabilities in comparison to IE, where these days it's mind blowing what you can do with it. Netscape is slow, where IE is *FAST*.

Sadly, IE on Mac is nowhere near as good as IE on PC - it's way behind in terms of features and performance. It is however a better stab at a Carbon app than Netscape 6, imho

...but this is a subject for a different thread altogether I guess - what's new for these threads to go way off the point?
 
I wish I bookmarked the article that i saw, but anyway I read recently that MS has sold off it's shares of Apple.
I think that the MS connection would be the most minor of considerations in acquiring Palm anyway. Does Apple even need Palm? Would it be worth it? You studied business a little bit, so do you think that there is enough there to warrant a takeover from anyone, let alone Apple who is completely capable of developing their own better pda?
 
Yesterday's PDA

Sadly, Palm is increasing looking like yesterday's PDA, in comparison to the latest Pocket PC devices. Palm are banking on input from recently aquired Be to bail them out by developing a new PDA system based on componenets of Be's failed Be OS. The Palm platform was never well written and requires a complete rewrite to remain competitive. A bit like the position Apple found themselves in before the development of OS X.

The prospect does not look good when you look at the track record of Be's management team.

If the Palm platform requires an entire re-write, then you have to ask yourself exactly what Apple would be buying. Not the technology that's for sure - they'd be buying the good will if anything, and that's not worth much these days.

If Apple thought there was money in PDAs, they're more likely to develop their own, but I think that would be suicide right now. I think it's more likely that Apple will focus on developing PDA support in OS X - if it's the digital hub then it has to connect to PDAs, and right now that's not a good story for Palm or Pocket PC useres.
 
Foocha, Thanks for backing me up with actual research and proof.
I agree that there wouldn't be much point to Apple buying Palm or Handspring for that matter. Innovation is what we want from Apple, like Final Cut Pro, wait they bought that off some guys that were already building it, or DVD Studio Pro, wait that was Astarte who made that, or I know! iTunes! No, that was Soundjam wasn't it? I think I shot my argument in the foot.
 
RE:SHARES

that is the best news i have heard in a long time

thanks for the info, san jose mercury is a good paper

...now let's hope bill didn't pull strings somewhere and do a leverage play back then...i just don't trust bill gates and remember this, there is a reason for every move he makes and he seldom loses

but for now, i will take the article at face value

go apple inc.
 
re: netscape

netscape 4.5 or 4.6 is great on my macs

netscape 6 is a little bloated on my mac but 6.1 is almost fast enough on my pc

on the two macs i have had, old '99 ibook and even older '96 mac clone, internet explorer always took forever to surf from page to page via the ancient 56k modem...dsl is still not cheap where i am even though just north or south a lunch hour away, dsl is affordable...go figure

when dsl comes cheap around here, i plan to use my trusty 10/100 port so i can get quicker downloads of useless junk instead of having to wait for my useless junk

[Edited by jefhatfield on 11-22-2001 at 11:24 AM]
 
Speed

Hope you get cheap DSL soon Jef. I figured it would be easier to get in Silicon Valley than here in London where we have to suffer the perpetual incompetance of British Telecom, but there you go.

When you do get DSL, I think you'll realise how much slower the performance of IE5.1 is on Mac vs IE5.5 on PC.
 
No cable service around there? DSL speed drops off the further you are from the hub, as I am sure you know so that might not be the setup for you in the country. I have cable and the speed is amazing, I guess nobody else in the aprtment building is connected! I will miss it. I'm moving tomorrow and the new house doesn't have cable. I think I can get DSL though. I hope. Otherwise I will be posting infrequently.
 
Just wondering...

Isn't this the kind of topics where every body start to talk about something else?
 
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