Linked by Thomas Hormby on Wed 17th Nov 2004 19:43 UTC
According to many economists, Gilbert Amelio is the savior of businesses in trouble. With this in mind, the board of directors at Apple decided to appoint Gil Amelio to the board after reporting another huge loss in 1994. At the time, Michael Spindler was the head of Apple, and sales in every division. The board accepted Spindler's resignation and appointed Gil Amelio to the helm of Apple.
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While the $150 Million dollar investment wasn't essential, but the money wasn't as critical as much as that Microsoft agreed to continue to making MS Office if Apple agreed to make MS IE the default on all of their Macs for the next 4 years. Not only did the deal boost investor confidence in the company, but it ensured consumer confidence that MS historically one of the larger software companies for macintosh continued their office suite on Mac. I seem to recall that Wordperfect had already killed development of the Mac version so really without Microsoft the only office software left would be the underpowered Clarisworks. If you think that Clarisworks would have kept Macintosh a viable platform you are deluding yourself.
Might Apple have survived without this Faustian bargain? Maybe, but we will never know for certain.
Personally I can't help but wonder whether Apple made a mistake in prematurely killing the Newton myself. While the PDA market isn't very profitable today, it was still a very good market for most of the 1990s for Palm and really Apple would have owned most of Palm's market during those years had they not handed the PDA market off.