Over 10 years ago, Microsoft plunked down $150 million to buy a stake in Apple. The share price back then (January 1997) was about $3.50. Today Apple is trading at $185. That’s around $7.9 billion in today’s money. Over the same period Microsoft stock is up about 50% (including it’s near 10% rise today). I imagine Microsoft ditched that stock long ago – there was even talk at one time that they might have shorted Apple on the day that they bought it to hedge any risk. Folks have even been saying recently that if, instead of buying a 5gb iPod on the day it came out, you’d bought the same value of Apple stock, you’d have over $10,000 today (looking at the graph, even if you’d bought in 2001 when the iPod came out, you’d still be sitting on 18 times your money at least!). Apple’s certainly on a tear – it’s now worth more than IBM and more than Intel.
Today, the day that Leopard comes out, I finally upgraded my workaday Windows laptop to Vista – I’d been running Vista under bootcamp on a MacBook for a while but it wasn’t getting much exercise. I started the upgrade with trepidation – the rumours about it being a difficult install are rife. They weren’t kidding. The first install trashed my PC and left me no option but to reformat and install from scratch (the approach everyone who’d already done it had recommended in fact). This worked smoothly. Restores from backup went fine. Only one driver crapped out on me. All of my software works. And my PC appears rock solid stable and fast – which is better than it was the day before.
I’ll be installing Leopard on the Macs in the house over the weekend I imagine.
