If Microsoft does spend a billion on a time machine, my advice would be to buy Apple's 2006 stock and hold it in trust. I have zero confidence that Microsoft in 2006 or in 2011 could buy a disruptive company and not destroy it.<p>Which is, I think, the arch point of Gruber's quip. If Microsoft had bought Apple in 2006, does anyone seriously think Microsoft today would have a dominant position in phones, music players, music distribution, and tablets? Would it have a world-class retail chain?<p>Moving forward to 2011, people point out that B$8.5 could buy a lot of startups. Assuming that they could identify it, Microsoft probably could buy the next Apple or Google. Heck, they could probably buy it just by trying to buy everything. But does anybody seriously think that if Microsoft does buy the next big disruptive company, it would still be the next big disruptive company?
For 8.5 billion, you could hire a couple dozen of the highest class escorts forever and travel the world in a super-yacht with them for sixty years.<p>Or you could pay a ton of people that you hate the most a dollar per hit to punch themselves in the face for a year straight.<p>Or you could build your own Skype service from scratch and have about $8,499,500,000 left over to maintain and market it.
This is daringfireball? Well, you could buy Apple stock, iPads, iPods, MacBooks, movies and songs on iTunes, AppleCare packages, Mac Pros, iMacs, Mac accessories, and iOS apps. Nothing else is worth buying.<p>Oh, oops. Read the 'article'. My joke is more accurate than I thought.
Its fun to read these sorts of things, back in the day when I was at Sun and Sun had taken a billion dollars of VAX business away from DEC there was a similar article about what DEC could have bought with that missing billion dollars in revenue.<p>A hallmark of a successful business is that it generates enough cash that you can step into adjacent markets. The down side is the risk to your focus if the adjacent market it too off axis.
For perspective and comparison, MSFT paid a $32 billion dividend to shareholders in 2004. With their cash on hand, they could have bought 4 AAPLs. They currently pay out around $5-6 billion in dividends per year. AAPL pays out $0.<p><a href="http://luhman.org/blog/2004/07/23/dividend-capture-and-microsofts-msft-one-time-dividend-3-share" rel="nofollow">http://luhman.org/blog/2004/07/23/dividend-capture-and-micro...</a>
It's a weird thought experiment; $7.5B adjusted for inflation from 2004 to today would be ~$8.9B. (18.3% inflation.)[1]<p>By this logic, Gruber would still be short of money.<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.usinflationcalculator.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.usinflationcalculator.com</a> (or any other inflation calculator).
Entire text of TFA follows:<p>--START--<p><a href="http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap" rel="nofollow">http://ycharts.com/companies/AAPL/market_cap</a><p>For just $7.5 billion, you could have bought Apple — in January 2004. That leaves $1 billion to create your time machine.
In 1997, Microsoft rescued Apple with a $150 million investment just so that Apple could survive as a viable competitor.<p><a href="http://www.apple.com/ca/press/1997/08/AppleMicrosoft.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/ca/press/1997/08/AppleMicrosoft.html</a>