20 Years Ago Today, Sun Almost Bought Apple for $4B (daringfireball.net)

Sun had an amazing way of being ahead of themselves and then not quite following thru.

Apple was a steal in 95 and the network is the computer. All very obvious today.

Yet the world is reigned by other giants.

If this happened then the future would not have been what it is today.

Perhaps Sun would not have valued Apple and eventually shut it down.

Perhaps likely that Jobs would not have returned.

It would be a mistake to think that Sun would then have ended up owning the Apple of today.

Then Apple wouldn't be Apple. This makes me think of the reflexivity idea Soros wrote about in Alchemy of Finance. It's valid to bemoan not buying Apple stock 20 years ago, because the purchase wouldn't influence company trajectory. Looking back wistfully at not buying the company completely changes the situation with restructuring, M&A integration issues, key people leaving or losing autonomy, Apple development fitting into the Sun vision rather than independently.

I think an interesting counterpoint would be to imagine what some companies could have gone on to accomplish if they hadn't been acquired, then killed. There's been tons of promising/interesting companies acquired, then never heard from again.

It would have been nice for locked-down devices to have been set back by a few years.