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A comment on Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 investment in Apple. Parent comment

Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by ajross on Friday March 02, 2012 @01:56PM (#3657810)
They would have made a little under 1.2 [edit: 9.7, typod math] billion dollars if they still held the investment today. Which would increase their cash and short term investment reserves by about 2% [edit: 10%].

Microsoft is printing money. Cash is not what they need or care about.

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Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by bcrescimanno on Friday March 02, 2012 @02:06PM (#3657859)
[Edit: math was corrected above] I'm not following your math, 18.2 million shares of Apple today would be worth about $9.8 billion--for a $151 million investment. I'm sure there are nuances that I don't fully grasp; but that's a huge discrepancy.

FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that MS should have held onto that investment; I was only answering the question about the purely financial ROI.

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Re:Steve Jobs used patents to pressure Bill Gates into 1997 ... by philwelch on Friday March 02, 2012 @05:06PM (#3658600)
On the other hand, the ROI on investing into Apple might compare favorably to a lot of their actual business moves since 1997.
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