I thought Microsoft "invested" $150M into Apple because Apple caught them red-handed stealing QuickTime in order to get Video For Windows out as competiition as quickly as possible ?
The $150M was basically a settlement because Apple was threatening a multi-billion dollar lawsuit over the theft (and it was blatant, the code was definitely a copy).
In addition, MS had to support Apple, writing Office etc. for MacOS for the next 5 years.
Apple said that in return they'd drop the look-and-feel lawsuits that everyone said were going nowhere. That gave it more a semblance of a "deal" than a "MS screwed up bigtime, got caught, and are paying for it now".
> The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known. Microsoft didn't do so out of altruistic impulse; they did so to decrease the odds they'd be the target of anti-trust legislation. I'm sure the c-suite at Google is very aware of that history lesson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a more likely anti-trust target than Google. Alphabet was a proactive effort to stay ahead of that curve. This is another. It's also why I suspect they either gifted Duckduckgo the domain, or sold it at a modest price. Even if they squeezed Duckduckgo for every penny they could and maximized the duck.com sale price, that's a penny in the couch for Google, and of insignificant benefit, compared to the license to print money that they maintain as a monolith.
The $150M was basically a settlement because Apple was threatening a multi-billion dollar lawsuit over the theft (and it was blatant, the code was definitely a copy).
In addition, MS had to support Apple, writing Office etc. for MacOS for the next 5 years.
Apple said that in return they'd drop the look-and-feel lawsuits that everyone said were going nowhere. That gave it more a semblance of a "deal" than a "MS screwed up bigtime, got caught, and are paying for it now".