... Years ago, back in 1997 I believe, Microsoft was forced to give Apple $150M USD to prop-up Apple, to create competition. ...
... So, for anyone reading this, Microsoft was not forced to give Apple $150M. I have no idea where the poster got the information, but I’m assuming it was made up...
It was not made up, per se -- but it absolutely is a misinterpretation of events.
The time was the late 1990's. Apple was somewhat on the ropes at that point, having had some pretty significant setbacks with their next-gen OS development (dubbed "Copland") and likewise languishing badly in the hardware innovation department; that was when journalists from even non-technical publications were claiming that Apple would "one day soon" go bankrupt. Amid that, there were also some rumblings about Microsoft possibly pulling the plug from the Mac version of Microsoft Office... because obviously if Apple went bankrupt, Microsoft would no longer have a reason to care about their customer base, right?
Meanwhile, Microsoft was going through their own troubles; the DOJ was seriously contemplating the possibility of splitting up the company, due to Microsoft's
very real monopoly power, and the ways in which they were perceived to be wielding it to their advantage. Microsoft's influence over the computer market was rivaled only by Ma Bell's influence over the phone industry, just prior to Ma Bell being broken up by the government a couple of decades earlier. Desktop Linux was still barely a twinkle on the horizon, Apple was basically a single-digit also ran at best, and....... well, there is no "and"; aside from Apple, Microsoft Windows basically controlled the
entire desktop computer market. Thus, it was easy to see the very real possibility of Microsoft being broken apart.
So while all of that was going on, a truly bizarre thing happened at Apple: they outright bought the entire company that Steve Jobs, their previously ousted CEO, had founded after he left Apple. They also ousted their (then)
current CEO, Gil Amelio, who had been driving the company right off of the proverbial cliff, and they invited Steve Jobs to retake his old position. Steve accepted -- at least as an
interim CEO -- and almost immediately started making huge waves... because, as anyone who knows anything at all about his life story will tell you, that was quite simply exactly what he did best. (I won't go into all of those details, as they are not particularly relevant to this telling of the story.)
One of the waves he spawned was a truce with Bill Gates and Microsoft -- which included a $150M investment in non-voting Apple stock, and a commitment to continue developing Microsoft Office for Mac, for years to come. Mind you, contrary to what many believed, Apple wasn't
actually that close to being bankrupt, quite yet... but the investment helped to dissuade the general public -- and more importantly, other software developers -- from
believing that they were. As a side benefit, Microsoft was able to refer back to that investment in their antitrust hearings as a kind of, "See? We're
not an anticompetitive monopoly! We even invested in our (ahem) strongest competitor!" response to that whole break-up thing that they were potentially facing.
So Microsoft was by no means
forced to make that investment... but Steve did convince Bill that it would be best for both companies if they did so.
The denouement of the story is: Microsoft was
not broken up, though they did have to live with some government oversight for a little while. They also eventually sold their Apple stock at a pretty decent profit. And of course, with the resulting renewed confidence in their longevity, Apple went on to produce several tremendously successful products, including the iMac, the iPod, macOS X and the iPhone, alongside quite a few other somewhat less successful products. The rest, as they say, is history.
(Source: I lived through the 90's, and I voraciously read all about it at the time. Also, you can Google "Microsoft antitrust case" and "Microsoft investment in Apple" if you're interested in putting the pieces together for yourself.)
