06.22.99
Pirates, of course
Jun 22 Tue (10 AM)
Pirates of the Silicon Valley was on TV Sunday. It was not a documentary. It was entertaining. The best scene was where AMHall walks into NW’s office, there’s a small click as the door shuts, a pause, and then without turning around… “YOU STOLE FROM ME!”
Too bad they didn’t mention Apple’s undisclosed settlement (multi-billion from what I heard) with MS, the millions that Xerox made after Apple gave them stocks in exchange for seeing the GUI at PARC, the Apple comeback, nor MS’s problems with IBM over OS/2, nor either company’s metioric rise in stock prices.
There were far more dramatic things that they could have explored. Perhaps mentioning that Jobs built another billion dollar company in the entertainment industry, and sold a third company to Apple would have made it more interesting…
Plus the sum up lines were pitiful. They were two years old, and seriously dated. the $100 Million in (non-voting) Apple stock that MS has would be more considered a good thing for Apple because it was part of a package saying that MS wouldn’t drop Apple’s platform. It was part of the MS appology.
As for the analogy about stealing TVs, a better formulation would have been that the rich neighbor had a yard sale of left-over junk, Apple bought it for a cheap price, then MS stole it from Apple.
I want to see Steven Levy do a HACKERS II, a sequle to his his incredible re-telling of the history of the valley (and MIT) up through… 1986? or so.