>...The story of Microsoft floating a significant loan to Apple in order to keep Apple solvent in the late '90's is well-known.

That might be well known, but it never happened. To resolve a patent violation and alleged stolen source code, Microsoft bought 150 million dollars of Apple stock. (There were other aspects of the agreement, but there was no loan.)

Your general point was likely right - Microsoft could have dragged out the trial for years and they likely didn't want to be seen as the only maker of OS software for personal computers.

Disclaimer: The following is based on my memories of working at Corel at the time. My memory is crap, so it is possible I've made mistakes. Please verify the authenticity of my claims if it is important to you and don't take my word for it.

At almost the exact same time, MS bought Corel Stock that enabled Corel to stay afloat. It was non-voting stock, but it had a veto on acquisitions (to reasonably protect their investment). They assured people that their didn't intend to use the veto and even worked with Corel to help them find companies to acquire with their new capital (one of them being a certain very cool artistic paint program, whose name I forgot).

Some time late, MS sold their Corel stock to Vector (VC company partly owned by Paul Allen) at a huge loss. Vector then told the Corel board of directors that they would exercise their veto on acquisitions unless the board authorised a buyout by Vector. The penalties on the acquisition deals would have put Corel under, so they had to agree. Vector bought out Corel at an attractive price. Derek Burney (then CEO of Corel), was replaced, but actually gave up his parachute clause in order to take a role as senior program manager as Microsoft. Most of the other senior VPs also managed to land roles at Microsoft. Vector admittedly ran Corel well and made quite a large profit by having a new public offering and selling 25% of the company. They were sued by previous share holders of Corel, but I didn't hear how that lawsuit ended up (I think the previous share holders lost).

I actually talked to Derek Burney about this stuff before he was ousted and he told me that he didn't have any choice in the way it went down. He said they were basically completely out of money before MS stepped in and that without MS's help, they were months away from completely shutting down. He didn't comment about the rest of how it worked out.

My assumption at the time was that the "investment" in Apple was intended to be a similar kind of operation, but that Steve Jobs was too canny to fall for it. I'd love to see all of the conditions attached to that money to see if I'm right.

I don't follow the scheme here. What are "penalties on the acquisition deals"? This all seems rather roundabout when it's dependent on the company being close to insolvency anyway, so they could have just bought them outright to begin with if that was really their master plan.

I'm guessing Corel was in the middle of an acquisition that had a back out penalty. If the acquisition was vetoed, the back out penalty would have bankrupted Corel. Sounds like blackmail to me.

In order to buy a publicly traded company outright, you need to get permission from the board. This is just the machinations to get that to happen -- at a price that they wanted.

Is this not just a classic example of HN looking for the negative in every positive? Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy and MS pushed them off it. Conversely, DDG is nowhere near bankruptcy and although it may be easier to type, a shorter domain name is not going to drastically increase the competitive edge that DDG has over google. To me they seem in totally different categories.

> Is this not just a classic example of HN looking for the negative in every positive?

A company single-handedly helping to save a direct competitor defies all business logic and obligations to shareholders of that company. The truth is this was a business move to benefit Microsoft, even though it had a benevolent factor to it.

Thinking otherwise is overly optimistic, similar to how you believe it being a classic example of HN pessimism.

DuckDuckGo is hardly a competitor to Google. I struggle to think of some future scenario where Alphabet looks back and thinks "Damn, we never should have given DDG that domain name, it was all down hill from there!". No antitrust investigation is going to believe that this small action makes any difference to Google's total dominance of search.

There is nothing illegal about a monopoly. A monopoly that uses it's position to prevent competition is illegal. Giving DDG a very valuable domain name (given their name) absolutely does what you're saying it doesn't.

How is not giving the domain name to DDG using their monopoly to suppress competitors? This is not equivalent to say, removing DDG from their search results.

I don't think that's what they're saying. The point isn't that withholding the domain name is the end of the world, the point is that handing it over is a small token that Google can use to claim that they aren't anti-competitive. I don't know what my stance is on that interpretation, but that seems to be (to me) to be the intended interpretation.

Does that make sense?

That's not what they're saying. If/when the feds come after Google for (most likely unrelated) monopolistic suppression, Google can say "we don't suppress our competitors--look how we helped out DDG!"

I agree in the case of Microsoft/Apple. In Google/DDG we're talking about transferring a domain name from one company to another, not saving a direct competitor.

I accept that MS/Apple was a competitive move. I’m not sure I accept that duck.com is.

What you described does defy all business logic... except in the presence of regulatory externalities (anti-trust legislation) that causes the business move to be a net positive.

I don't think there's any optimism or pessimism to it, just rational actions.

At the time, Microsoft made more on application software for every Mac sold than for every PC sold. Microsoft and Apple were competitors on operating systems, but not on applications, and Apple's Macs were a significant (though smaller) part of the market. The relationship between Apple and Microsoft was never as simple as just direct competitors.

> Is this not just a classic example of HN looking for the negative in every positive?

No. Google has the monopoly on search (outside of China). Avoiding anti-trust is a huge concern of theirs. Look at MS and IE in the browser wars - they were forced by the EU to build into Windows links/ads to the other browsers - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu#/media/File:B...

Whilst DDG has huge momentum by now, duckduckgo.com is still an ache to type - that's why ddg.co has existed for years, and why you use "DDG" yourself ;) duck.com is way more memorable and even faster.

Not a lawyer, but given DDG's brand recognition, I'd imagine they would have a strong case in an ICANN dispute given that Google are not using it. Google are proactively avoiding at least this bad PR by doing the right thing (this week).

> No. Google has the monopoly on search (outside of China).

No. Russia has yandex.

[1]: http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/rus...

How is having the duck.com dns a trust issue? Google could just as easy create some purpose for it and ddg would have a hard time proving that a domain that does not have its product name to be inflicting monopoly.

Conversely, how does transferring the domain helps Google on court? If they are a monopoly, then surely it isn't because of naming.

(I do defy the affirmation that Google has a monopolity at all - Bing and ddg are likely alternatives that anyone can use - it's very different from, let's say, IBM mainframes... But I'm no expert in antitrust laws)

If Facebook owns groups.com but aren’t using it, can we go to ICANN and ask them to give it to us?

ddg.gg is easier to type and for my fingers to remember than duck.com.

How about duck + (Ctrl + enter) ?

That could work =).

It’s not only looking for the negative. It didn’t happen.

Whatever the reason, MS only infused $150 million into Apple’s coffers.

Apple turned around and used $100 million to buy PowerComputing’s Mac license. Apple also continued to lose money for 3 years. The Net $50 million didn’t “save Apple”.

I hadn't heard that bit of history, found it interesting. Though apparently they spent $10mm in cash and $90mm in stock to acquire the company.

They could have sold it for $1 with a clause stating that ddg wouldn't partake in any antitrust action brought by any foreign government for 2 years. Value to Google would be worth tens or hundreds of millions in potential fines or revenue risk.

Then DDG obviously would have just said no? I think the idea is that it was a political move meant to show a sense of goodwill between the two to the public, not to force DDG to be subservient to them in some way.

That's why I put two years. I don't think any company would agree to a longer term.

Damn, that makes it seem like less of an olive branch and more of a cover-your-ass move. Either way, it's still a boon to DDG! (or just D?)

Good point. Mozilla also received (still receives?) a substantial amount of money from Google, no doubt that achieves similar goals -- prop up a competitor -- although it also helps Google make their search engine the default for Firefox users.

You're hedging way more than you need to in this comment. They get a crapload from Google.

Mozilla brings in revenues in excess of half a billion dollars per year. The royalties alone are in excess of half a billion per year.

Note that the most recent figures we have are from 2016 when Mozilla was on the Yahoo money. The 2018 won't be available for a couple years, but it should hint towards how much the new Google contract brought in. And the intermediate one should show the blip of the Pocket acquisition along with figures sugared by the kickbacks that Mozilla originally lied about not receiving. (Spoiler alert: Mozilla themselves eventually admitted that the info was untrue with regard to not benefitting directly from the Pocket partnership. Just a proviso for anyone who wasn't following along closely and might assume that I'm making baseless conjecture. These are facts.)

I was thinking the same thing. Thanks for pointing it out.