| > Software, driven by Apple’s founder was threatening to take Apple’s market NeXT was already a failure and was transitioning out of the hardware business. Apple couldn’t make a modern operating system to save its life and was getting crushed by Microsoft. > Post Jobs’ death they bought a black celebrity-driven entertainment company. This was absolutely a brand threat as Apple was now associated with Tim Cook, who is perhaps many amazing things but they do not include cool. People aren’t buying iPhones because of a producer that most outside of Hip Hop only knew because he was the producer behind a famous White rapper (Eminem). > Microsoft’s existing businesses, if someone else got ahold of them Microsoft would have zero social footprint, which would be a big problem for them, having essentially missed out on search as well. Under Satya, they moved away from Windows everywhere to cloud and Office everywhere. Azure isn’t popular because of GitHub. It mostly targets stodgy old Enterprise customers that are already on the MS platform. That’s not meant to be an insult. I was a stodgy old enterprise MS dev until 2018 when I started moving toward AWS technologies (where I now work). |