How Microsoft Saved Apple

Gates and Jobs

We often hear about Steve Jobs being a brilliant marketing executive that brought Apple to the forefront of technical innovations. Less remembered is the time when Apple was close to bankruptcy speculating it had only 60 days to turn the company around. Coincidentally, Microsoft was in court defending itself and offered 100 million dollars to Apple to show it had a viable competitor. This made the argument that Microsoft had no real competition less plausible though in truth, the company was still a monopoly. Nevertheless, it gave Apple the funding it needed to stave off bankruptcy and inadvertently created a far bigger competitor than Microsoft could have anticipated. True Microsoft's dominance may have hastened Apple's earlier hardship but without fierce competition, Apple might not have been so driven to innovate as much and gain the position it has now.